Krita Monthly Update – Edition 15

Tuesday, 7 May 2024 | Krita News

It is time for the monthly news update brought to you by the Krita-promo team. Let us take a look at the highlights of krita community and development for this month.

Development report

  • Our users on chromebooks faced a nasty bug which crashed krita on startup. So we made a 5.2.2.1 hotfix release for Android Play Store only to fix this bug. It also contains other fixes from the stable branch, but be warned there is a known crash regression with importing audio.

  • A proper 5.2.3 release for all supported platforms will be made as soon as possible, hopefully in the next few weeks.

  • At the time of writing, nightly builds for macOS are still blocked by a signing-related issue. Once that is resolved, automated builds for all supported platforms will be up and running again. That is the culmination of months of work by lead developer Dmitry Kazakov, together with macOS developer Iván Yossi, Android developer Sharaf Zaman, Windows contributor Simon Ra, and others, in a refactor of Krita’s build system.

  • Feature Request: Palette in Toolbar has been marked “solved” by freyalupen’s most recently merged code. Add docker box toolbar widget allows the user to add any docker to the toolbar in a temporary popup widget similar to the “choose brush preset” one in Painter’s Tools.

  • A problem with certain RBGA brushes has been solved and will be part of the next release. Users were experiencing lagging and freezing when accessing these brushes. The thread makes an interesting read as it’s a “live” look at an issue being revealed and it shows how helpful it is when users conduct testing. You can read the thread here.

  • Ken_Lo has been accepted as a student for Google Summer of Code, to work on pixel perfect hand-drawn lines.

  • In addition to various recorder related fixes by @freyalupen, the FFmpeg profiles in the recorder docker are improved by @Ralek. We congratulate @Ralek on their first contribution to Krita.

  • When entering canvas-only mode, the document used to jump abruptly and reposition itself. @YRH helped in solving this issue.

  • Deif_Lou has improved performance of the fill tool making it faster.

  • Ken Lo added an option in the settings to pick default export file type.

default file type option for the export

  • Grum999 has looked into improving Krita’s API for python plugins and as a start, chose to implement a scratchpad API that adds functionality to the scratchpad.

  • Emir Sari sent patches to help Krita build on Haiku OS.

Community report

March 2024 Monthly Art Challenge

The April Monthly Art Challenge, Animal Curiosity, inspired submissions from 26 artists. @jimplex was voted the winner with this creative piece: Firefly by jimplex

Firefly by Jimplex

The theme for the May 2024 challenge is “reflection.” You can get all the details here. We already have some ideas and pre-work flying around in the discussion and WIP thread. Have a look – something might inspire your creativity.

Krita-Artists members nominated 9 images for the featured artwork banner. When the mid-month poll ended, these are the 5 that won a place on the banner. All 5 will be entered into the Best of Krita-Artists 2024 competition next January.

Cabin in the woods-RH by Rohit Hela

Cabin in the woods by Rohit Hela

Detailed Portrait by denjay5

Detailed Portrait by denjay5

Nier Automata by IvanGilbertt

Nier Automata by IvanGilbertt

Alien Senator by DavB

Alien Senator by DavB

My uni project by smollbirb

My uni project by smollbirb

Nominations for the April/May poll are open until May 11, 2024.

Noteworthy plugin

Blender-Krita link plugin for texture editing by heisenshark

This plugin has a fresh update that the author describes as a “big overhaul of how the plugin works.” Check out the thread on Krita-artists.org here.

blender-krita link

Tutorial of the month

Krita’s newest tutorial by Ramon Miranda features an interview with Rakurri, the creator of Rakurri’s brush pack containing more than 200 brushes made just for Krita. Ramon demonstrates his favorite ones such Glow FX, Liquid Bristle and the vegetation brushes.

Notable changes in code

This section has been compiled by freyalupen. Apr 3 - May 2, 2024

Stable branch (5.2.2+):

Bugfixes:

Nightly build regression bugfixes:

  • Layer Stack - Fix wrong layer being active on opening document. In the case of single-layer documents, no layer was active, which caused crashes under some circumstances. (BUG:480718) (merge request, Dmitry Kazakov)

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):

Features:

  • Toolbars, Shortcuts - Add Docker Box action that shows a docker in a temporary box, which can be added to a toolbar or assigned to shortcut. (merge request, Freya Lupen)
  • Canvas Input Shortcuts - Add new Tool Invocation action, "Activate with Other Color". This can be bound to a key+mousebutton, where holding those keys will cause, for instance, the Freehand Brush to paint with the background instead of foreground color. (merge request, ziplantil)

Bugfixes:

Nightly build regression bugfixes:

These changes are made available for testing in the following Nightly builds:

Like what we are doing? Help support us

Krita is a free and open source project. Please consider supporting the project with donations or by buying training videos or the artbook! With your support, we can keep the core team working on Krita full-time.

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