This post no longer represents my views on the Krita development community. Please understand that anything you read is from the past, written in the context of a very stressful yet unrelated situation, and opinions have changed drastically.
This doesn’t excuse the things I’ve said and I’ve elected not to try and erase them. Instead I will wholeheartedly apologize to anyone I have offended with this post.
Always support your local open source developers.
Long rant feedback post warning.
Recently there was a thread that went wildly off topic, that ended up focused on the programmer vs artist dynamic within the Krita development workflow. If possible, I’d like to reopen this dialogue in its own thread so that we can have a discussion about it.
The original sentiment was that the Krita development workflow feels detached from artists, with a couple quantifiable examples such as the discontinued Krita Weekly report, and development Kickstarters falling out of style.
To start off, I’ll be spouting my own bias laden ideas on the matter. Feel free to skip this first paragraph if you don’t care about my credentials and just want to read my ideas.
About me
I am an artist and animator first and foremost, with 11 years experience in nearly everything remotely artistic. I’ve used Krita for going on 3 years now, having moved from 5 years of Clip Studio, 2 years of SAI, 3 years of Flash, and on and off with PS, AI, AE, Paintstorm Pro, Blender, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Unity and Black Ink for various specific projects or pictures.
On the flip side, I’m probably one of the few artists that has at least a bit of development knowledge. I wouldn’t call myself a developer, but I’d like to think I have enough experience to at least have a bit of insight into the process of development. Though my experience is mainly around website front/back end and orchestration such as Kubernetes, and I’ve never touched C++ so I haven’t been able to help much in the Krita front.
Far spreading, short reaching
My first gripe with Krita is that it is a jack of all trades and a master of none. If an artist colleague asked what Krita is best at, I don’t know if I’d be able to even come up with something. Except maybe price.
It is great software in a widely general sense, and notable for 3 main things:
- It is free
- It is open source
- It does a lot of stuff okay enough to let beginner artists experiment with art
But artists are diverse. Much like there are full stack devs, there are full stack artists. Artists who animate a little, paint a little, ink a little, make comics, concept art, textures, vectors, whatever else. But most don’t, most specialize. And I think the tools that Krita provides don’t allow the specialization needed to maintain these people or keep them around.
I cannot imagine that most artists who are a master of their respective trades find what they’re looking for in Krita. Some can, but then again there are masters of MS Paint as well who make great artwork with that. I don’t think the existence of great artists on Krita is a good argument that the program is in a good place right now. It needs to start targeting professionals needs, or it’s going to keep attracting jack-of-all-trades types like me or new artists. I’ll get to why this sort of targeting is important in a later section.
This lack of specialization kicks specialists off the platform and leads to a recurring theme I think we’re going to touch on a lot in this post:
Survivorship bias
There are a lot of great artists here, I see their portfolios and I’m amazed at what they’re able to create and paint and animate. That being said, I think there’s an inherent negative feedback loop where the program is tailored and reworked to accommodate the people who survived getting used to Krita, and unfortunately I think that’s a minority, and further unfortunately, I think they’re not usually specialists in their industries.
I believe this leads to Krita being reinforced in areas that are ironically enough, not as important. The people who first download Krita, get annoyed, then leave, don’t provide feedback. I’m someone who’s suggested Krita to many colleagues, professionals making a living off of their art, and got immediate feedback and complaints from them about why they refuse to use it. There are a lot of recurring problems that I think should be addressed that never do because these artists never actually complain on the forums. They just leave.
The problem then gets ignored on the forums because ‘not enough people think it’s a problem’. That’s wrong, a lot of people think it’s a problem. Everyone I’ve ever tried to get into Krita thinks it’s a problem. You’re just suffering survivorship bias because they never get into the program deep enough to care about giving their opinion.
Consider a poll that focuses on artists who don’t use Krita, and exactly why. I think that’s more productive than most ideas I see here. You might be surprised.
Artist-unfriendly development
I am not talking about the software itself. That’s for a different section or post. I mean the development process is difficult for artists to follow. I’m not sure how to fix that, I wasn’t around for Krita Weekly Report or just didn’t hear about it. Development, especially open source development, is tricky, and confusing, and naturally hard to follow. Artists don’t know what a git repo is, some might just think it’s a download site for free software. Let alone merge requests, landings, builds, betas, etc. They likely don’t use Linux, and while I consider programming a form of art, the thought processes and type of people behind both art and development are polar opposite unless you’re one of those few who’ve done both.
I’m an artist not a PR person, I’m not sure how to tackle this one. I just know if you want artist feedback, artist ideas, or artist involvement in development decisions in any way, whatever the project’s been doing definitely isn’t it.
Just as a recent example, and I can’t stress enough that I’m very happy for this update and the people who’ve put effort into it, but the recent animation sound design update.
What? You want feedback? Yes all that sweet feedback from the artists who
- Use Krita
- Use Linux
- Download test builds for feedback
- Can animate not only doodles but stuff that’s involved enough to require lipsyncing or other fine-grain sound design.
All 2 of them? How do you expect feedback from artists? Nearly everything in the entire Krita development workflow is this hostile to artist involvement. Do developers truly expect or want feedback from artists? Who is really making the decisions for what’s best for the program?
This leads to my next point:
Krita feels like it’s made by devs who think they know what artists want.
Some other user in regards to another open source software that I believe is having the same issue as Krita
With the exception of the few developers I’ve seen who are they themselves artists, the program as a whole feels like it’s going the way of GIMP, but as a replacement for SAI or CSP instead of Photoshop. There are many, many aspects of the program that feels like GIMP. And I can’t properly explain why that’s a bad thing, since I’m sure most devs reading this probably prefer GIMP. I get it, it’s a completely different mindset.
Shout out to the great devs that seem to work very closely with the artist community to rework tools to be as artist accommodating as possible. Still suffers survivorship bias but it’s a step in the right direction.
Artists don’t usually ask for features from Photoshop/CSP/whatever proprietary software because they’re hypnotized by corporate propaganda and marketing schemes into believing that dinglebop tool is superior. They actually believe the tool is useful in some way. I understand the frustration of sorting through the effortless ‘please clone X tool’ posts that don’t explain why it’s useful.
From an outside perspective, some of these programs have probably spent more money than Krita has ever received, purely on getting professional feedback about some random tool. And you’re going to ignore it? That consumer feedback is free, you can take it. They can’t patent things like drag-to-fill-multiple-spaces (thanks for adding that) or brush strokes saved as vectors (fingers crossed).
Doing things different for the hell of it is so beyond confusing to me. If it works, it works well, everyone loves it, it’s useful, it speeds up workflows, I don’t get why you wouldn’t look into it just because the dimwit on the forums worded his request like ‘Pls add dinglebop tool from Photoshop thx’. It’s like stack overflow users closing your question because someone else asked the same question but dumber and that original question doesn’t even answer yours.
Tangentially to features, this can even go into areas that are from a developer’s perspective completely pointless. UI animations. Smoother actions/panning/rotating. Less perceived input latency. More animated splash screen. Yes, they don’t do much. But artists are fickle and easily excitable, love to be inspired and amazed, and they love feeling like their programs (and websites, I’ve found) have emotion. You’d be absolutely floored at what some simple (from an outside perspective) tweaks or little animations could do. Apple figured this out and led the way in the creative sector forever until Windows finally got their crap together. This is the biggest telltale to me that Krita is made by developers first. It’s extremely useful but has no emotion.
Krita is underfunded
And who’s fault is that? Genuine question. Devs claims the artists simply don’t donate much, or that art isn’t as marketable as blender and 3d work, artists claims the devs don’t listen to them enough to warrant supporting it.
So what is it? I dunno.
I have some theories tho. Artists are not a high demand profession. Very, very few artists make a living off of their artwork. And those that do, probably specialize in something. As I covered in the first section, Krita is not for specialized artists. It simply doesn’t have the deep enough tools to accommodate them. It is inherently influenced by, and tailored toward hobbyists. Which is not inherently bad please don’t call me elitist. But if you want funding from artists, you need to make the program marketable by artists.
I donate to many open source programs, some big like Blender, some medium like ShareX, and some small like PostyBirb that aid me in distributing, marketing, and creating my works. I do this for several reasons.
- The program addresses a problem I have and offers a fast and intuitive way to fix it.
- The devs, when I do ask them something, are understanding and helpful, they feel like they are actually trying to provide a service to the user. Even when a suggestion fails, I feel as though a decent effort was given to explain why not, without using hand wavy excuses.
- Using the program feels snappy and responsive. At no point in time do I feel limited or roadblocked because of the program’s inability to utilize my hardware or because of poorly optimized functions.
- I wanted the software to continue the path it was going.
I am extremely hesitant to do the same for Krita, because I don’t know if I would personally agree on any of these points in reference to Krita. Despite using Krita arguably thousands of hours more than the others, unlike these other programs and sites, I don’t feel like Krita makes my life easier vs the alternatives. The closest I’d get to donating to Krita would be either commissioning a feature or donating to one or two specific devs directly who I feel take artists into consideration. I’d never donate to the Krita foundation directly with the way things are going.
It’s okay
While using Krita I constantly feel like it’s just good enough for me not to rage-quit it. Hiding and showing layers is slower than every other application but it’s just fast enough for me not to switch. The canvas pans at 300 FPS but it’s choppier than every other application, but just smooth enough for me not to switch. The animation tools are restrictive, but just featureful enough not to switch.
Same for everything. Everything in Krita feels like it’s just enough for me not to have a full blown breakdown over. It almost never makes me feel good about drawing. It solves all my drawing needs, technically, but never makes me go ‘yeah that’s fast and intuitive’. I’m genuinely trying to remember the last time in 3 years I was amazed at some feature I found in Krita and how well it performed, but I can’t. The colorize brush is kind of cool in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way, but pretty slow and lacks some pretty useful features. And I didn’t stumble on it and get amazed, I was forced to use it because the other coloring methods I was used to were so bad that I was instructed by a dev to use the colorize brush. So not only are my alternatives so bad that it’s advised not to use them, the one singular solution provided to me was also hard to work with.
Conclusion
I want to open this thread to get feedback from both sides of this weirdly divided sentiment, and hear about your own experiences, your own personal feelings toward what Krita is, what it wants to do, etc. Here are some baseline questions to help get a calm discussion going:
- Do you think Krita is underfunded? Do you think more funding would make devs listen to artists more, work on code more, or both?
- Proprietary software must listen to artists because artists pay their bills, this leads to the program naturally improving in ways that make the artists happy or the software explodes. Does Krita emulate this in any way? What reason does Krita have to make artists happy?
- Do you think there even is a divide between developers and the artists of the community? Or am I just salty and not putting in enough effort to embed myself in discussions?
- Do you think development should either focus on fixing the things Krita does that drives away artists, or focus on improving the things that current Krita artists already enjoy?
- If you heavily specialize in a type of art like painting, animation, comics, vector, etc, do you feel like Krita provides enough tools to make it truly worth switching from a proprietary competitor? For instance CSP for comics, Photoshop for painting, CSP or Toonboom for animation, etc.
- What do you think Krita is? What is is supposed to truly do amazingly besides be free and open? Or do you feel it is supposed to be a jack of all trades?
- If everyone agreed that there’s a divide between what artists (both current and potential Krita users) and the devs want, do you have any suggestions or ideas for a way to bridge that gap?
Anyway that’s rant over for me. I’ve just been feeling this way for so long I finally had to get it out in the air. It likely won’t change anything at all or do anything, but if even one thing changes for the better it’d be worth it for me.
Edit: While I may seem angry I just want to clarify that it’s a righteous indignation born from wanting to see Krita succeed, prosper, and improve. I value and support all paid or volunteer workers on Krita’s source and without them we wouldn’t be here. Advanced, in-depth tools and features require a strong base and a lot of Krita’s features seem to be a decent base, they just need some love and care to find their usefulness.
)