[Review] Sketching Line Art Digitally - Mischief and Krita

While getting myself ready for the new Concept Cookie "I Can Draw Anything" workshop, I felt the need to find something to use for digital line art, since Photoshop never made me happy in that area. When doing some research, I found many people suggested Mischief. During this week's CoCo livestream, I was introduced to another app called Krita. So in this article, I'm going to talk about these two applications, and what I liked most about each.

First and foremost, the whole reason behind finding another program for line art, was finding such that could help with "line smoothing", giving each drawing a nice clean look.

I started off downloading Mischief, and working with the 30-day trial. Even without the trial, the cost is only $65 USD. Like some other applications released in the past 7 years, it seems to charge $65 as a base price, and slightly lower cost for an upgrade. This was something I did like quite a bit, and always thought that business model was something more companies should use, but I digress. On the other side with Krita, the cost is FREE since it's Open Source. While a lot of other programs get a lot of flack for being open source, I've found some of the best programs to come from open source (Remember Mac users, your OS came from Open Source).

Initial Thoughts

Mischief

The one thing I liked a lot with Mischief was that you could hop into the app, and start using it without any issues. The entire UI is very intuitive, and extremely easy to use. For what I need it for, it works great. The lines are all automatically smoothed, and can simply draw my line art as easily as possible. At the same time, it is still a "layer based" digital design program, and has all of the basics right at your fingertips. The only thing I don't like, is that it seems to lack a lot. Keep in mind this is after using it for just a couple hours, and haven't tried to find any extras that could be hidden. To be honest, I didn't really see anything else I could possible play with. While it is very easy to use, it almost seems like a glorified Paint app with layers.

Krita

When I first started Krita, I found myself faced with an instant setup for my canvas. Screen resolution, DPI, Color Mode, Color Depth, Profile Presets, Custom Profiles, and more. One again, it was easy to get started, and I was able to draw nice smooth lines all over the place. Unlike my encounter with Mischief, Krita has a large wealth of options, and has a bit of a learning curve (I still don't know how to switch back to the brush from the tool, instead of just pressing "B"). The good part is that the developers have added many features to make your drawing much more fluid-like. For instance, it has a "right-click modal" to switch to a brush type, change the color value, and change to a recently used color. Since Krita has a large selection of brush types, you can choose which ones will show in the "right click modal", and probably customize the modal in other ways. Aside from those awesome features, there are so many other options available. It almost seems like Krita is its own brand of Photoshop, having filters, custom brushes, various tools, and so much more. Needless to say, I didn't get too far in Krita, but I found myself face-to-face with a lot of tools I had never seen anywhere else, that I could find many uses for,


Overall

Even though one seemed very simple, and the other extremely resourceful, I liked them both. With Mischief, I liked being able to jump in, draw, and not mess with anything else. When using Krita, I loved the options I had to draw with, as well as possibly looking at a Photoshop replacement. Needless to say, I will definitely work with both of these a lot more. I will continue to use Mischief to create line art, and import it into Photoshop for rendering. At the same time, I plan to return to Krita as well, simply to learn exactly what all it can do.

Latest Thoughts

After posting this, I was working with both of these during my current workshop, and ended up switching my mind completely. Krita is great in the sense that it can be a Photoshop replacement, but at this moment in time, it has too many bugs for me. The first thing that pushed me away, was the lagging issue, where it works very slow. With lineart, this wasn't a big deal, but when I started to get use to rendering, it was horrible. Now many people will suggest to turn on the "OpenGL" option in Krita to fix this, but for me, OpenGL makes it slower, since I'm using an ATI card as my display card. I do have an nVidia card in the system as well, but Krita doesn't have an option to choose what card to use like Blender.

So the lag was one issue, and the other was because of constant crashes. Most of my crashes were due to some rendering issue, and surely went hand-in-hand with the ATI. Needless to say, I plan to replace my ATI with a high-end nVidia to increase my Blender performance, but I do not plan to upgrade early just to satisfy Krita. Needless to say, I cannot wait to see Krita being completely stable, as it is a great digital drawing application, but until then I switched over to Mischief, who also had a 60% off sale this week.