I’ve been exploring Krita. While there is a lot that I like, I am finding selecting brushes to be very confusing. Kirta comes preloaded with more than a hundred brushes and whenever I pick a new brush, the one I was previously using becomes lost in the huge list of other brushes. I found the tag system for creating your own brush palettes, but it was tricky to use and there seemed to no way to assign a brush you built to a certain palette.
Does Krita have another way of arranging brushes? Maybe something more like Photoshop has where you can get a preview of what your brush stroke will look like? It’s the biggest factor holding me back from using Krita. There’s got to be a better method than just hunting through a list of hundreds of brush icons each time you want to switch brushes.
I hope I didn’t misunderstand you, but English is not my first language, I hope you excuse that.
To organize your presets, or to assign a brush to a palette, as you call it, you first have to click on the button for the brush presets (the 4 squares) in the toolbar (1), then you can either select an existing category in the dialog that pops up (2), or add your own categories after pressing the little button (Tag) in the upper right (3). If you now search for your brush using the search function (4) at the bottom of the dialog, you can add the brush (the preset!) to the currently displayed category by clicking on the disk symbol (5) at the bottom right of the search bar. This works even with all selected brushes at once.
Where to save your presets (brushes) in categories.
Edit: As for the brushstroke preview, you asked for, I only know that there was some talk about it recently, and I think it was about possibly adding something like that in the future. However, I have only followed this discussion in passing.
I’ve been exploring Krita. […] whenever I pick a new brush, the one I was previously using becomes lost in the huge list of other brushes.
Hi Mark, keep exploring!
Is “switch to previous preset” – default shortcut: / (the slash) – the function you are describing?
Also, after familarizing or finding some fave brushes, ‘Ten Brushes’ script would be very useful, possibly even now! It switches brushes (in a limited way), as clarified below:
To enable:
top menu bar: Settings > Python Plugin Manager. [May need to scroll the left sidebar to the bottom.]
To choose your 10 brushes (or less): Tools > Script.
Now you use Ctrl+1 … Ctrl+9, Ctrl+0
[or pick your own keystrokes].
Now you can switch between your latest two brushes (one of which must be specified with “10 Brushes” scripts, in step 2) by pressing twice the same keystroke you picked at step 3.
I actually only use it for Ctrl+1, for which I picked a medium solid eraser. The default “E”-shortcut eraser is size- and brushtip-dependent on the present brush, so it might not erase as clean/thoroughly.
Maybe something more like Photoshop has where you can get a preview of what your brush stroke will look like?
Krita doesn’t rely on brush-stroke swooshes.
But, to make the brushes less overwhelming, you might find it helpful to display brush names, as I did when I first started Krita. You can show the names by clicking on the button at the top-right of the Brush Presets dockers/panel.
In fact, in Photoshop, I hid Brush Stroke and Brush Tips, b/c they take up too much screen real estate and (for my style of painting) are unindicative of the brushes in action.
I think anyone can come to be reliant on just brush names or thumbnails, if they train their mind to make the association. Give it a week of extensive use.
Don’t give up; keep going!
Thanks for your help, everyone. One other issue I’m having is every time I switch brushes, the brush size changes to be whatever the default is for that particular brush. Is there a way to get the brush to remember what size it was when I last used it?
Also, if you just simply don’t like the default size & want to permanently smaller/bigger, across restarts/reboots, you overwrite that brush by clicking on “edit brush settings” in the toolbar to get the pop-up:
(Logically, the “overwrite” button is disabled/grayed-out until you’ve changed the size, brush-tip or any other parameter.)
Or you can create another/separate brush (i.e., not the overwritten same one) by clicking “save new brush preset”. If you can’t find the newborn brush in a specific tag, you’ll find it in the “All” preset list.
Hello and welcome to the forum 
