Short Version: Hi! How do you make a brush that tapers on both ends?
Long Version: I’m new to Krita and I wanted to follow a Bob Ross episode to get used to the brushes, but I’m not interested in that tutorial series that gets recommended to people all the time. For me it’s too slow and covers a lot of things I’m not interested in.
I’m only interested in learning how to replicate the look of real world brushes in Krita, like a fan brush, so I can just paint on my own. I started reading this to learn about the settings in Krita:
But I have two problems…
I can’t get my brush to paint the way it looks like it should in the brush settings half the time. I’m using a Genius 8x6 and the pen pressure works. It just doesn’t always do what the setting thumbnail suggests it should do when I draw on the scratchpad or canvas, which makes it feel like half the settings I’m learning about don’t do anything when I change them.
I’m trying to replicate the look of just pushing with a fan brush where it’s more solid in the middle and textured and trailing off on the ends and I can’t figure out how to change the shape of a brush to do that. Specifically, how to taper it off on both ends. Not opacity but the physical shape of the stroke.
Question:
I’ve already wasted two days looking into this. Can I just download brushes that do what I want or can you point me to ones on Krita that would replicate dabbing with a fan brush?
That way I can get on with painting and also review the brush settings to figure out what settings make it do what it does in case I’m just missing something trying to tweak brushes myself.
If you are trying to replicate Bob Ross style then the iForce73 blunde are really good. Here the link.
I believe the tutorials you are refering to are the one by @AgeOfAsparagus. If so I recommend you check the Speedpaint by IForce73 where he (or she) showcase their brushes.
I will not dive into your two problems mostly because I don’t think I fully understand them, and because I’m not well versed in the brush settings and making brushes. However I will give my two cents.
About problem 1: The brush preview at the top of the brush editor tries to show all the range of settings enable in a brush, specially if the pen settings are enabled. So it show all the variations a brush have while painting, and not how it will always look in every situation.
About problem 2: To me this looks like something more related to the brushtip, for this you have to use a image as your brushtip. In the predifined on the Brush Tip in the editor. You can also use animated brush tips to differ the shape of each dab. Others settings you can change the shape of a stroke are the size, ratio and using Masked Brush.
This wont answer your question but I think is important to note:
Even with realistic brushes (which is already hard enough if not impossible in digital art, depending on the brush) you won’t be able to use most of them anyway because a lot of brushes that go in the direction of behaving like real brushes use tilt direction, tilt angle, and tilt height a lot, maybe even pen rotation and form what I could find out from the GENIUS support site:
The tablet only supports the basic function of pen pressure
so, a lot of features probably don’t work simply because your pen can’t do it, basically everything that needs additional sensors other than pressure.
Thanks for sending that. It confused me a bit since it said:
“You can’t do this to the end of a brush stroke because there’s no way of predicting where a brush stroke will end. All you could do is use pressure control and then manually reduce pressure at the end of the stroke, which is difficult to do accurately and repeatedly.”
I’m able to get opacity to fade on both ends of a brush with the settings alone just fine, not needing manual pressure. But opacity isn’t my issue, it’s the actual shape of the tip I can’t taper in the same way.
I already tried playing with other settings like distance and speed, and no matter what I do with pressure and its curves, in settings or manually with how hard I push, it won’t taper off at both the start and end of the stroke, only one or the other.
There are brush tips shaped with a tapered top and bottom already, which I could use for dabbing to get an effect close to what I want, so I tried playing with those, but they had no texture like I need and adding texture kind of messed them up. I’ll just keep looking into it, thanks!
Thanks! I already know that about my tablet as well as the issues Krita’s developers had with Genius drivers. The problem is being able to tell which brushes do what and how to make them do what.
That’s why I was interested in tutorials that focus just on Krita’s brushes rather than on how to paint. Like I said, at this point, I’d rather just download some brushes that say they do what I want or close to it so I can compare their settings and tips to what I was trying to do that didn’t work.
Krita is so finnicky, there’s no other reliable way to know what I can’t do because of Krita versus because of my tablet.
Checking the link you sent, I think their brushes will work! Thanks again. I did find some charcoal brushes already in Krita that could produce the shape I wanted if I pushed down once (dab) instead of swiping.
Then strokes and pressure wouldn’t matter because I wouldn’t be drawing strokes anyway, I’d just be dabbing on the natural shape of the brush that’s already tapered at both ends. It was the best workaround I could think of at the moment.
The problem was the tips were too fat (wide in the middle) and I couldn’t figure out how to make them skinnier without also making them shorter or changing other properties.
Imagine a diamond shape. Diamonds taper at the ends and are wide in the middle. If you want the diamond to be thinner, you change the width. It would still be a diamond, the ends would still taper and it would still be the same height, it just wouldn’t be as fat.
That’s what I was hoping I could do with the few brushes I found that looked how I needed them too, but none of the settings made the tip less fat. That’s when I gave up trying to adjust brushes already there and figured I’d find new ones that work. These IForce73 ones seem to fit the bill. Take care!
Glad the bundle works fine for you. I remember the .Zip file had a collection of .bundles files and a folder named something like Brush tips. You have to manually copy the contents of this folder into Krita’s brushes folder. To find Krita’s brush folder the easiest way is go to Settings → Manage Resources → Open Resources Folder
For me this is something you can do using the Ratio property, but you have to use a Brush Tip that favours your intent. Here some examples
