2025, June - Krita Configs

I've heard about people making really amazing digital art on their phones, and while I have tried creating digital art on a computer, the way I usually like to work, I've found that the 10.x'' tablet that comes with a passive pen is somehow much more convenient to use, and also doesn't get nearly as hot while it's on my lap. I think it's the pen. I already have more devices flying around without having to charge pens separately, and having to wait half an hour before I can start doing what I was trying to do is a good way to dissuade me from doing it at all. I always thought there were as many drawbacks for using the tablet as there are for using the computer, mostly because the android app for krita seems like it's still very much designed for desktop. It's even got the window menu.

I'm not sure how I would solve this design problem, short of creating a completely separate UI for every type of device, but considering krita is good and free, I don't begrudge them not going for this solution. Instead, like most free software, it'll mean that I'll have to put in the work to use it properly. I'm not thinking yet about doing all the power-user stuff, adding brushes and the like, I just need to get the task-bar to account for the fact that I don't have any keyboard shortcuts anymore, and make sure I can work with layers. So first the taskbar.

I had to look around for the taskbar options a bunch. What my tablet gains in practical small size and heavily reduced weight, loses in screen real-estate to display the menus that the devs thought were important for full operation of their program. Since I can't meaningfully change that, I will have to cut my losses. I decided to do without one of the top bar menus entirely, since the application had cut it out of the interface anyway, and get back the undo/redo buttons.

This is done using one of the menus up top, and using a very classical scheme. It's not one I've every grown to like, but it functions, even on a tablet, and I basically got what I wanted.

Now, up to this point, I've layered colours over colours. That's fine, if my sketches don't really need a substantial amount of more detail, and can stay mono-colour. While I'm not so sure about when I'll implement colour as an intentional element in anything I do, when I still need to do work on perspective and the aforementioned detailing, I definitely need to stop leaving the sketches as messy as I've been doing, so I need that layers menu back. Now, there's krita-supplied menu presets, which almost all give me back said layers menu, but while I'm dabbling with those configurations, I might as well build my own. I wasn't going to be using more colours than I could access using the colour-select up top. I don't have an intuition about what value changes do either, but in either way, I can strike the colour-menu out to make space. I see myself experimenting with layers a lot, so that'll be something that can get substantially more space. I'm not sure I exactly need the brush selection on the right, but I'm not so sure I won't benefit from it either, especially once I start adding more brushes. I save the configuration to the machine, and there's an option to export it to a file to use on a different device. Now that I know how this works, it's ready for relatively painless iteration. The point here was to learn how to use this application better, and now I suppose I have the ability to change the menus once I find features I need more urgently than another brush menu.