Feedback from a Krita noob, resource discoverability

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Hey folks! I’m a fresh Krita convert, been using it for about two weeks now. First off, let me say: I’m blown away by how fantastic it is, both the software itself and the community. (I’ve never donated to a project so fast after downloading!)

Since I have “fresh eyes”, I thought it might be useful to share a bit of my experience as a new user, particularly with respect to finding brush packs and other similar resources. (Apologies if this post should go in another part of the forum… seemed most relevant here.)

Please take my suggestions with a grain of salt, of course! And apologies in advance for the long-winded post :smiley:

I’ll start with some issues I ran into, and then I’ll list some concrete ideas/suggestions I have which might help the situation for other noobs.

First off, a few of the challenges I ran into:

  1. The official Krita “resources” page feels pretty out of date and unloved. There’s no link to this forum, where most of the activity seems to be happening. (Docs that live in GitLab will likely always be a bit behind the latest community activity, which is why simply linking to this forum would be good, I think.)
  2. Even once you arrive here, many of the most fantastic brushes/resources are hidden deep within years-long forum posts or in YouTube video descriptions. Some of these threads are buried, if they haven’t had comments in a while.
  3. These forum threads also tend to be a bit scattered – finding them is tough, even with the “Search” tool. For example, the unbelievably good charcoal brushes don’t show up when you search in the “Resources” section at all, since it’s posted in the “Contests” section. (I only discovered these brushes thanks to a random YouTube recommendation!)

Now, some suggestions :slight_smile:

Suggestion 1:
Include a link to this forum in the official Krita docs! Particularly the official resources page, which feels a bit barren and outdated. As a newcomer, I went there first and was a little disappointed by how little I found. (I think a FAQ addition would be good too, e.g., “Where can I find new brushes and other resources?” And maybe on the subreddit FAQ and other similar places where noobs might wind up.)

Suggestion 2:
Perhaps a link in Krita itself to these forums, for example in the “Manage Resources Libraries” dialog or something. “Find more resources at the krita-artists.org forums”, e.g.

Suggestion 3:
Include a sticky post in this forum with some somewhat-curated “top suggestions”. I don’t want it to get political or anything :slight_smile: … this could also be in the form of a user poll or something so nobody is accused of playing favorites. (I’m sure there are more efficient ways to handle this, but I’m just thinking within the limitations of the forum format.)

I think at least including links to some of the more “official”-feeling brush sets, like those from @RamonM or @Deevad, would be a really great start for most newcomers!

Suggestion 4:
If the brushes/resources must live in forum posts, perhaps encourage a convention of editing the top post in each thread to always include the latest download links and versions. As a new user without much context, it can be pretty confusing to wade through some of these very long threads looking for the actual (newest) downloads.

Suggestion 5:
This suggestion is specific to the brushes from the official Krita YouTube channel: perhaps put brush downloads somewhere more discoverable than the YouTube video descriptions? Even once I found the krita-artists thread for some of these brushes, I didn’t expect the “source of truth” download links to be on YouTube. I spent a while searching through threads looking for download links until I discovered this. (Definitely makes sense to link to them in the relevant video descriptions as well, however.)

Okay, I think that’s it. Apologies again for the long post… and I hope I didn’t offend anybody!

Thank you all for everything!

P.S. I very much look forward to sharing some artwork here in the near future :slight_smile:

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ADDENDUM:
Oh, and in case other newcomers come across this thread and are looking for recommendations… here are some of the coolest brush sets I’ve found so far, in no particular order:

  • David Revoy brush pack: A fantastic all-around set from the guy who designed Krita’s default brushes! (Kind of like a personalized/updated/focused default set, from what I can tell.)
  • Charcoal set from RamonM.
  • Ink set from RamonM.
  • Sketch v1 and Sketch v2 brushes from RamonM.
  • Memileo Impasto Brushes. Amazing new(ish) oil-painting brushes.
  • RGBA “wet” impasto brushes from RamonM. (I’m noticing a pattern here!) These are some alternative oil-painting brushes. Note: not to be confused with the RGBA “dry” impasto brushes that come default with Krita. (These pair perfectly with those, though, and with the Memileo brushes above as well.)
  • Rakurri Brush Set: a huge set of very cool brushes which seem super-popular with the community.

…and I’m sure I’ll find others before long :slight_smile:

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Welcome to the forum. I moved your post out of the resources area and into the feedback area as you requested.

This forum is 100% volunteer run. Those that spend time in the forum are granted permission to move posts and even edit posts to make them more discoverable. Stick around and become a regular and you can help us improve!

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Hello, it’s an interesting post but… I don’t know any kind of ressources page like you described in official site of Photoshop, CSP, Paint Tool SAI, Affinity Photo…
As @sooz said, you can create a forum entry with a link to all ressources. It’s work but this work won’t be done by Krita’s developpers who have more important priorities. It’s to the community to manage such things, and you are part of the community.

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I don’t know any kind of ressources page like you described in official site of Photoshop, CSP, Paint Tool SAI, Affinity Photo…

All the more reason to put Krita on the top of the list :wink:

It’s work but this work won’t be done by Krita’s developpers who have more important priorities. It’s to the community to manage such things, and you are part of the community.

Indeed! I didn’t intend this thread as “developer feedback” – I actually posted it in the “Resources” section because I was curious to gather feedback from the community itself moreso than Krita devs. Other users – especially new users – hunting for resources. It was moved by the mod above.

In any case, I’m happy to help! I can open a PR to link to the “Resources” section of this forum in the official Krita docs, for example. I’d be happy to write a post for new users if that’s helpful (that’s basically what my “Addendum” above is, after all).

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I moved your post out of the resources area and into the feedback area as you requested.

Thank you! I wasn’t sure this would be a good fit for the “feedback” area, since it’s not really feedback for the devs, per se – more a thread for bouncing ideas to improve discoverability in the community.

Stick around and become a regular and you can help us improve!

Will do, thank you again!

(Edit: I deleted and re-posted this message; I had accidentally “replied” to the wrong post.)

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hi, thanks for quoting me in this interesting thread. If Inremember correctly there was another thread about resources where i put even a mockup to present bundles. i will look for it.
I am thinking in what you say, so, yes, I will try to present my brushes in another way.

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Those that spend time in the forum are granted permission to move posts and even edit posts to make them more discoverable.

In the meantime, I left a comment on the “charcoal” thread specifically… hope it helps some folks find these amazing brushes!

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Hi @ktf

Re the location for this thread – you’re right, the category I had picked isn’t perfect. In fact I moved it again this morning into site feedback. The problem I had is that this isn’t a single topic thread, it conveys ideas for the krita.org website (which we don’t control) and multiple areas of this forum so it’s difficult to get the perfect location for it.

Some of your forum ideas could fit nicely into the FAQ for this site.

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the category I had picked isn’t perfect. In fact I moved it again this morning into site feedback

No worries at all, @sooz! I should have distilled this down more. It does cover several topics at once :sweat_smile:

it conveys ideas for the krita.org website (which we don’t control)

Oh, of course! I found the source control for the official Krita docs, and I’m happy to contribute directly there. (A simple link to this site would help a lot!)

I just also wanted to mention it here, see how folks on this forum felt about something like that. As I said, as a new user, that official “Resources” page was a little disappointing. Conversely, (eventually) finding this site and its community was very inspiring! It makes sense, I think, for there to be a bit more interplay between the two.

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it conveys ideas for the krita.org website (which we don’t control)

I opened a pull request on the Krita documentation site to update this. Anyone here, feel free to weigh in if you have ideas on how else to improve the doc situation re: resource discoverability!

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If people are managing their thread well the first post is the most updated link and for discover ability just sort posts by read count or something similar to get the most popular ones first .

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Indeed, though that’s a big “if” :grinning_face: … maybe explicitly calling this out in a sticky post in the “Resources” section or something would help. A lot of the other sections have a “How to use this section” post, or something similar.

for discover ability just sort posts by read count or something similar to get the most popular ones first .

True, this is a decent proxy, but there are a couple of issues with this approach:

  1. Reading a thread (or even posting in a thread) is not the same as saying “I like this brush pack”.
  2. This isn’t super discoverable/obvious for new users. I think a FAQ item or something that links to the Resources page, sorted by popularity (or what-have-you), would at least call this out explicitly.
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Hi @ktf

Thank you for the feedback. Your suggestions are good and actionable. These kinds of feedback is severely lacking in todays fast paced social media world. So I love reading well thought out feedbacks, thanks once again.

  • I will try to edit the official resource page to include a link to the forums resource category. It might take me a while but I am planning to do it during this weekend.
  • I agree with long threads of the resources lead to scattered links. I can make the first post a wiki so that anybody or the author can edit it as the resources are updated. I will see if the first post can always be wiki by default. If not then the author can ping the moderators to mark the first post as a wiki. If wiki idea is not feasible then atleast the edit time limit can be removed so that the author can always edit the first post.
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Awesome, I’m glad to be of any help at all! I definitely didn’t want to come in and start saying “you should do this and that and this”, but I do know that sometimes a fresh set of eyes can be valuable. (Just like with a piece of art!)

Those changes sound great to me, by the way. Thank you for reading my long-winded posts and being open to suggestions from a noob :slightly_smiling_face:

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Looks like my request was (eventually) merged in! The official Krita “Resources” page now links to this forum (the “Resources” section, sorted by “top, all time”) and also to the Krita YouTube channel :party_popper:

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