I have a question regarding brushes in Krita. Clip Studio and Krita are my favorite painting programs on the Mac, and they have a lot of things in common. Actually Krita does some thing quite a bit better than CSP, especially regarding large brush performance. One thing I have not been able to reproduce in krita though, is the effect of the color mixing settings in CSP. CSP color mixing is just soooo nice. It is very responsive and in combination with the natural color mix mode very satisfying to work with.
I have tried just about every painting software on Mac and ipad, and no other software has this kind of mixing effect. Most apps smear the paint around but do not really mix it, and it has a blurry effect. In CSP it is buttery smooth yet also sharp.
I am pretty sure other Krita users are CSP users too and have experience with this and I would love to know if such an effect can be archieved with the Krita brush engine in a similar way?
There is no official version at the moment, but we have two different experimental versions (implementations), one with spectral mixing like in MyPaint, the next with spectral color-smudge blending, at least if I understand that correctly, but as I said, they are experimental, there are only portable versions for Windows and an AppImage. If you want to know more, or even try them, you have to read up their topics:
This regards the natural blending/mixing of the colors, which is one aspect of it.
But what interests me more is if it is possible recreate the kind of mixing with brush settings in Krita? In CSP it is possible to archieve more blending with the brush by applying little pressure, or have a stronger color by pushing harder. The brush interacts with the paint on the layer by creating a mix, not just layering a lower opacity version of the brush color on top. It does not smear the paint around though. I have not been able to archieve this in Krita with the either the pixel engine not the smudge engine.
From the threads you linked to (thx!) I did find one interesting point, which is the MyPaint engine does a similar thing, and can in fact create an effect close to what I am looking for. I need to dig in a bit more to understand what setting does what. I am not completely familiar with the brush engines in Krita, so I will need to do some research…
However, am I right that this engine does not support custom brush tips, only basic round ones? This would be a real shame as it would not be a able to create a testured paint brush like what I am looking for.
Those topics offer experimental builds of Krita, you won’t find it in current Krita or can simulate it with the currently existing possibilities. At least you won’t get green out of yellow and blue, like in your video.
The blue/green mix is not the most important thing though, but rather the way the brushes mixes the colors by not simply smearing or overlaying. The natural mixing is optional in CSP, but the color mixing in the brush works with and without it. I hope I explained clearly enough what I would like to archieve? In CSP, if color mixing is enabled in the brush, it is possible to control the mixing by setting the amount of paint, its density and the color stretch and control these with speed or pressure. I have not found something similar in Krita and none of the many brushes I have in Krita archieve this.
I think there was something to your request, but I can’t remember where to search for it, not even if it was a function or some kind of brush.
So I can only wish you good luck experimenting.
You could also use the rgba brushes such as the one I made: RGBA-Mix brush - #8 by CrazyCatBird You’d have to get used to how much pressure to use for the amount of color applied.
There’s also the wet brushes that mix on canvas:
Not sure what exact effect you have in mind (considering you don’t mean the natural color mixing), I would assume the Color Rate too but then, Krita’s default brushes have it (all the ones with purple-and-white strokes).
The most important ones besides the Color Rate are, probably, all the additional settings in the Smudge Lengths section, particularly Smearing vs Dulling. and the checkbox for the new smudge algorithm that came in 5.0 (and therefore isn’t used in the default brushes iirc).
What I am looking for is basically the same responsiveness in the mix of the colors when using the brush. Kritas brush engine(s) are set up in quite a different way than CSPs, which I have gotten to know quite well by now. I find it especially hard to get the right pressure settings to have a brush that blends more at low pressure but applies full brush color at high pressure. It is finding this sweet spot which is difficult.
I will dive into the settings and fiddle around and see if I can emulate my favorite brushes from CSP in Krita.
As a side note: I find it quite unpractical that to change settings of color rate etc., I have to open the brush editor every time. I know there is a sketch pad within the editor, but I would prefer an easier way to access these settings so I can test directly on the canvas.
The feature of Japanese painting software such as sai/csp/madibang is to separate and mix RGB and alpha. The latter provides a feeling of “moisture”
The rgba brushes will do what you described without messing with the settings. They will blend more with light pressure and apply more color with more pressure. You can also make sure the brush is in “parallel” mode.
I can paint with the brush I am modfying in the brush editor directly on the canvas.
If you move the brush editor window so it doesn’t cover the canvas you should also be able to.
mypaint > smudge (highlighted in green in my screenshot)
So I was able to get only blending with low opacity and full color by pressing more with this curve, if you want the color to start when you press harder you need to move the second handle up
I just wanted to get back on this topic, as I have done some more experimenting and think I found settings for the color smudge engine that get me similar results to the brushes I use in CSP. I have been trying modifications on some of Rakurris brushes, as they provide a great base. The setting that are most crucial are smudge length, smudge radius and color rate. Here are my settings:
With these settings I can archive something like this (of course Krita does not allow natural color blending like CSP yet, so colors do look different)
In the previous video, you can see that at low pressure on an empty layer, the color gets mixed with the white of the canvas. I just noticed that if the option “smudge alpha” is disabled in the brush settings, the brush will paint with full opacity on an empty layer and only mix with the pixels on this layer. This option is under smudge length and gives a result like this:
edit: If the option overlay mode is checked, the color will be mixed with anything on any layer, so it would look like the previous video.
The only weak point in this, which is the same as in in CSP, is that the color will always be the same for the complete brush stamp. depending on the pressure applied an average is calculated between the existing pixels and the color of the brush, but this will always look a bit strange on the edge of the strokes, as seen above. This is not quite realistic, but it is still very nice.
The examples above are using the dulling engine, the smearing option gives a better results on the edges, but the blending looks very different, so using brushes with the one or the other option next to eachother probably will get you there.
