Picarto Offline

This image also doubled as a test for using Clip Studio Paint to replace Krita.

I've been using Krita for a year or so now and it's pretty great, but the downsides are that saving files takes a good five seconds, which freezes up the drawing space until it's done. If you have autosave set to a short timespan then inevitably you'll get irritated by the constant pauses. You need to have it set to autosave often, because Krita also crashes a lot. If you do something with text it doesn't like, it crashes. It crashes when you're not really doing anything. Sometimes it feels like the autosaves crashes it too, you just never know.

I first started doing art in Photoshop years ago, but I found that the brushes needed wide spacing in order to be any use, narrow spacing between points made for a smoother line but it needed a lot of processing power, and if the brush was more detailed than a circle then it only got worse.

I switched over to Paint Tool SAI when I got tired of everything I drew looking like crap. SAI had simpler brushes, no option for more brushes in any easy way, but more customization of what's built in. It was also the first thing I bought myself when I started doing commissions. It's not a cheap program... though technically neither is photoshop.

Eventually I reached a point where I was spending ages trying to make backgrounds look good, and everywhere I looked at tutorials for them there were special texture brushes and stamps being used. I didn't want to go back to photoshop, but something cheap and similar would be good. Krita had just updated to version 3.0 at the time, so I got ahold of it at the cost of free and found it worked better than photoshop with its brushes, and while some of its features just didn't work (literally some of the buttons don't have images, you have to memorize the layout of them when making text objects) I was still more than happy to have the upgrade.

So, I'll gradually finish off my current projects and start shifting over the new stuff to CSP. It's going to take a while before I get it up to speed, when transitioning from one program to another you really need to draw your characters in full quality at least once just to learn the layout and make sure your color swatches are updated, etc.