Krita and MyPaint: differences between their goals

[Martin Renold]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 12:28:21PM +0200, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On Sunday 11 April 2010, silvio grosso wrote:
> > 
> > To make it short, I have been wondering what are the main differences
> > between MyPaint and Krita?
> 
> We have been discussing that in Deventer before. Basically, looking at our 
> vision statement and Maxy's statements about what he want to be MyPaint might 
> be the easiest way to figure out the difference:
>
> 
> Krita:
> 
> "Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end–to–end
> solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters."
> 
> "Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation
> of comics and textures for rendering."
> 
> "Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita
> supports creative working by getting out of the way and with snappy response.
> 
> MyPaint:
> 
> "MyPaint is a fast and easy open-source graphics application for digital
> painters. It lets you focus on the art instead of the program. You work on
> your canvas with minimum distractions, bringing up the interface only when yo
> need it."

In addition there is a goal page:
http://mypaint.intilinux.com/?page_id=56

To me, the main difference seems that Krita is targeting "masters".  Users
who have time to explore the GUI and configure the program to match their
workflow.  Users who start with the goal of finishing something.

I mainly care about amateur painters.  Users who want to explore their
creativity for fun, as a hobby; only to relax or with some ambition.
Users like myself...

If all they want is doodle with ink, then MyPaint will simply let them do
that, without introduction.  If they want to try a new technique, they might
find something by actively exploring the GUI.  MyPaint is supposed to stay
in the background, not offer too many GUI elements to fiddle around with,
and let the user work in flow.

Of course it is great to know that professional artists also like this :-)

There is no plan for explicit comics or textures support in MyPaint.  Appart
from that, the goals are pretty similar, now that Krita has turned away from
Photography.

> sketch to finished file, but rather one phase in the artistic process.

There are plans to cover a bit more more of the process, eg. there is an
experimental branch already to choose the final image size/resolution. 
Brush modes to brighten or darken are eventually planned.  A simple global
color correction slider would make sense, but that's about where it ends. 
In particular, we don't want to support selections.

> Krita doesn't mind showing the user complexity

That's a key difference.

> MyPaint doesn't care about the traditional painter's workflow, nor about
> brushes that reproduce traditional media effects -- Krita does that
> explicitly (though we're reproducing the effect, not the physics!)

True, but my impression is that users don't notice this difference much. 

Someone just has to name their brushes "Charcoal" or "Pencil" or "wet", and
there you go...

> Maxy? I know you're on this mailing list -- feel free to chip in with more, or 
> with corrections :-).

I am, but real life was kicking in during the last couple of weeks. I'm
mostly up to speed with mailing lists again now :-)

> [...], and I'm still working on integrating MyPaint's brush engine in
> Krita, as well.

I would have liked to support you a bit more with that, and make brushlib a
bit less of a "tear-out" library.  Currently I'm swamped with MyPaint
related stuff that I should/want to do...  maybe we can discuss this at LGM.

-- 
Martin Renold