Hey! This is my first post here! I’m new to Krita and I would say a beginner digital artist, but decently average artist in real life depending on the medium.
I was reading some of the beginner topics on Krita’s website and saw you could do Vector layers in Krita, which is cool.
My question is, For the primary layer line art where you draw (say the outline and features of an anime style person like they always give as an example), would it be beneficial to do that layer as Vector because you can manipulate it more without losing quality (in stretching the image and etc)?
Then the other layers as Raster (coloring, etc)
Bonus questioins
Can you merge Vector and Raster layers?
If the answer to my very first question is yes, is it common that most digital artists use Vector layers for the line art?
You can merge a vector layer with a paint (raster) layer and the result is a paint layer. You can convert a vector layer to a paint layer (but not a paint layer to a vector layer).
For lineart sketching, your main question would be best answered by someone with experience of vector lineart. A point to bear in mind is that editing a vector line for shape is quite fiddly and by the time you’ve played around with it you could have done several paint lines using Ctrl+Z to undo until you get one you like.
If it’s clean/controlled lines you want then the brush smoothing options can give good results removing any minor or even major hand wobble so you could have a look at those as well.
You mentioned editing with vector line can be fiddly, so I’ll probably experiment with it just to learn the possibility of using it as a tool in the future, but keep with raster paint lines and Ctrl+Z for now. I’m definitely used to that.
Right now it’s not really feasible to do “proper” line art as vectors in Krita unfortunately. The freehand path tool gives decent results, but it creates just plain bezier paths, simple solid uniform stroke, so basically you’re getting the same sterile look as in any vector editor.
The calligraphy tool was meant to give some stroke effects following direction and pressure, but it’s rather buggy, and paths still end up as plain vector shapes after saving so you basically loose the editing capabilities.
Last but not least, we lack good editing tools for complex paths as created by the calligraphy tool. The freehand path tool optimizes paths to remove all excess control points, so you can edit them better manually, but that pretty much kills the possibility to reproduce pressure/angle/tilt etc. along the path nicely.
I have thought about starting a new vector tool exactly for anime-style line art, and borrow many ideas of blender’s grease pencil, especially the editing tools, but that’s one heck of a project.
I can’t really tell you how common vector outlines are in the wild, I never really dived deep into the other tools like SAI, PS/Illustrator, Sketchbook that all seem to have vector line tools with various abilities.