I’m currently trying to create my own brush by altering the “Ink-4 Pen Rough” preset for the following reason:
As many people do, I usually draw little thumbnail sketches of my ideas first before I start the drawing in the final size. It usually looks a little something like this (I hope you’re still able to see that somewhat decently despite its size, the brush (Ink-4 Pen Rough) is set to 7px, canvas on 300 ppi):
You should (hopefully) be able to see that the outlines aren’t completely unicolour but vary a bit (I assume in their opacity).
Now if I want to draw a larger version of that sketch, the lines I draw with the same brush, set to let’s say 22 px, are extremely sharp with no alterations in their opacity towards the edge (except when zooming in to pixel range):
Even if I draw the exact same linework and match the thickness of the lines to the stretched-out sketch, every result I get looks way less interesting because of the lack of visible variation in those lines - and I’d like to change that.
So! I tried to use Krita’s brush-creation-tool to try and find a way to alter the preset brush in such a way that I can basically draw a scaled-up version of my little thumbnail sketch. I assume what I’d want for that is for the brush to lose opacity the further it strays from the center, maybe for the outer 30% of the line? I tried playing around with the ‘softness’ setting that the airbrushes use, leaving out rotations, playing with the opacity settings - but I can’t really get it to work. The continuous circles with less opacity overlap weirdly and even more importantly, the brush is now for obvious reasons extremely soft and doesn’t look at all like its very sharp origin.
Does anyone more familiar with the brush-creator know what settings I need to tweak to get close to the result I tried to describe? Or maybe there’s even a different solution to this that doesn’t require brush alterations at all but some other mechanic or technique?
I would be immensely thankful for any kind of feedback on this problem ^^
The “variation” of lines in the lower resolution is that, with small brush size, anti-aliasing will be much visable.
To scale up the “anti-aliasing” matching larger brush can be done with the “softness” (not sure how to fine-tune, Default/Soft/Gaussian ?).
But there’s another factor for “variation” : Pixel. To observe clearer when scale up your sketch, you can switch the transform tool filter to “Nearst Neighbor” and use integer scale like 200%, 300%, 400%… to see more clear the original pixel grid grow up. (Or just zoom in like the screenshot below)
(Looks somewhat “scattering”, but done a quick test with “scatter” and the result is not ideal, still some other parameter to adjust.)
You scale the sketch up with the default Transform tool filter “Bicubic”, which will make some interpolation between the “pixel grid”, but some “dynamic feel” still preserved.
Since I’m not good at tuning brush setting, can just came out “Why scale up brush cannot make same effect when in small size” from my knowledge.
Yes, @Lesqwe56 's advice to play on the Mask Type in Brush Tip (1) sounds to be the right move to get what you are looking for. Here is an example going from Default to Soft (2) and making a very low soft curve (3) :
Fig1. A proposal screenshot on how to setup your brush preset.
On a side note; this fuzzyness/softness of rendering at lower size was a long issue in Krita. It’s usually annoy makers of brushes who wants to make small and large brushes with a similar behavior at all scales. The brushes for inking are also problematic at lower scale. First time I meet here a case where you get advantage of the lower scale bug fuzzyness to find your sweet spot for painting.
The new feature (for future Krita 5.1) of Supersampling will fix soon this difference of rendering for the autobrushes smaller than 10px. You can read the Supersampling development thread here if you are curious about it, development by Dmitry Kazakov and with my beta-testing pictures.
This example under (to see at 100%) with and without supersampling shows what it fixes for small line-art brushes. But it will affect what you like on making your small thumbnail sketches with Ink-4 Pen Rough as you do right now (but if you do the modification with the Soft + Curve brush tip as on my screenshot, then in future 5.1 the preset will get same −or very close− behavior at all scale, in theory).
Thank your very much for detailed reply, I’ll definitely look into that upcoming supersampling feature. Very amusing to hear that what I like to use for drawing is more of a bug and not a feature. Hopefully, there will be an option to turn supersampling off when Krita 5.1 releases, otherwise I’ll have to find some other workaround.
The softness settings you and @Lesqwe56 proposed are actually the same settings that I played around with on my own, however it’s sadly not quite what I’m looking for. There’s a certain sharpness to the brush that gets lost in the process.
Knowing now that the brush isn’t even supposed to behave the way it is when on low px size, I’m not certain it’s even possible to replicate that behaviour…
Thanks for your reply! The softness options sadly don’t really get me the desired result. However changing the Transform tool filter to ‘Nearest Neighbour’ actually yields some interesting results (I had set mine to ‘Lanczos 3’ before). It’s not exactly what I’m looking for but I’ll definitely play around a bit with that setting, very fun for pixelated art.
