In this lesson video, we'll be covering the basics of freehand brush tools in Krita. To access the freehand Brush Tool, we can click on this tool that has a brush icon on it. Or you can also use the keyboard shortcut for the brush tool, which is B. Okay, we can pick Brush Preset by clicking on this button up here, or by pressing f6 for shortcut. For example, let's make this Brush Preset in here and just draw some random strokes on the canvas. And let's pick this one.
We can see this brush has different behavior from the previous brush. If you want to know the name of the brush, we can hover our mouse cursor for about two seconds on any of the Brush Preset and Krita will display the name and the larger thumbnail of it. If you select a brush, we can tell the name of currently selected Brush by looking at this left bottom area at the status bar, okay? If you open the Brush Preset panel in here, or by pressing f6 again, you can see that critter already shipped with so many default brush presets. If you go to the internet, you can even find more brush presets that you can download. Not to mention, you can also create your own brush presets.
My point is, we need a way to manage these ubiquitous brush presets so that our brewing workflow is optimal. If not, you will spend more time looking for brushes than actually using them. There are several methods to manage brush presets in Krita. First by using search and filter, second by using tags, and third by assigning the brush tag to pop up palette. Let's see each of these methods one by one first is using the search and filter functionality. For example, if we want to search only a pencil brush, we can open the brush panel by pressing f6 then click in here and type pencil.
Notice now the brush presets panel only display brushes that has the word pencil in it, and the other brushes will be hidden. Another example, let's say we want to display only brushes that can blend colors, we can type in the search bar blend. Now we can only see all of the blend brushes. Okay, to clear the filter, we can click on this X button in here. Now we can see all of the brushes again like before. The next technique of managing brush presets is by using tags.
By default. The brush presets included in Krita already have tags associated to them. To see the tags you can click on this pulldown list. Up here, and then choose any tags you want to see. For example, let's select this eraser tag. Now we can see only the brushes that are tagged as eraser.
Another example, let's pick in, we can see the brush presets. Or another example we can select pixel art, etc. Now what if we want to create our own tag? Can we do that? Of course we can. Let's say we want to create a new tag called my brushes 01.
To do that, click on this button, type my brushes 01 then hit enter the panel no filter, the brushes belong to the my brushes 01 tag, which currently empty. We just created a new tag but we haven't assigned any brushes to it to add brush presets to our new tag, first select all in here so we can see all of the rushes available in Krita. Let's pick this pencil for ourself and assign our custom tag to it. The Brush Preset can have more than one tag associated to it. So to assign a tag, right click on it assigned to tag and choose my brushes 01 Okay, let's add this Brush Preset airbrush soft, tag it with my brushes 01. Then, let's select and take this one also basic to opacity.
You can try each of the brush presets, and if you like it, you can tag it with our custom tag. Okay, after we have suffered brush presets tagger, if we click on this pull down list again, and then choose my brushes 01 tag. All of the brushes we tag before are now displayed in the brush presets panel. And the ones that we didn't take will be hidden. Okay. Now using tag is important not only to filter them in a brush presets panel, but also to use them in a pop up palette.
If you right click to open the pop up palette, these circles in here are actually for the brush presets to add brush presets into these circles Krita use tag. So to change the tag to our custom my brushes 01 tag, we can click in here and then choose my brushes 01 Now we can see our selected brushes before show up in the pop up palette. After we learn how to manage brush presets. Let's actually discuss on how to control several aspects of the brush behavior. First is the brush size. To change the size of the brush using the UI approach, you can use the top slider up here in Krita.
Every sliders like this can be used to talk In the value directly, okay, so to manually type in a value, we can hover on top of it, and then right click, then we can type any value in here, for example 30, then enter. The brush is now 30 pixels size. Okay, we can also use the proper palette to control the brush size, just right click and change the size using the slider. If you don't see this floating panel, you may need to click on this small arrow button down here, which is actually for showing or hiding the brush control panel. Now personally, I am not a big fan of any UI methods to change the brush size because we cannot see the changes right away against the drawing. If you want to have pure keyboard approach, you can press the opening bracket key to make the brush smaller and you can press the closing bracket key To make the brush size bigger, my favorite method is using the mouse and keyboard combination.
To do that, hold shift and then click and drag with the mouse or your pen. If we move it to the left, the brush size will get smaller. And if we move it to the right, the brush size will get bigger. Okay, so that is how we can control the brush size. Next is opacity. opacity controls how opaque the brush stroke is against how transparent it is.
We can control the opacity by using this opacity slider up here. 100% means the brush strokes will be fully opaque. 50% will be semi transparent, and zero percent is fully transparent, making the brush to be completely useless. We can also control the opacity using the slider in a popup palette. If you want to use keyboard shortcuts, you can use I and o letter keys. Press I to decrease the opacity by 10% decrement and press O to increase the opacity by 10% increment.
Okay, the last brush control we are going to discuss in this lesson is erasing. In Krita. There is no dedicated tool for eraser. All brush types can be used as an eraser by turning on this eraser mode up here. For keyboard shortcut, we can use the letter E key to toggle on or off the eraser mode. press E to change the brush mode to eraser.
Press it again to turn it back to normal brush mode. If you have so many strokes on the canvas and you want to remove all of them quickly, you can do this by simply pressing the delete button if you are coming from other To graphic software, you might be tempted to do select all command first and then press Delete. Well in Krita, you can do that also. But really, you don't need to do any selection first. just pressing Delete is enough.