Not in the Release: Improved Brush Tools

Although Rempt is excited about the improvements in v3.0, he also speaks with some regret about features that will not be ready for the release. "I really had wanted to finish the stacked brush engine, where you could make a stack of brush presets and set a blending mode, random offset, and masking, and then paint with all of them." Rempt managed to design an interface but not to implement the engine.

Another issue that has been delayed is improving the brush engine. "It's too big and can be both confusing and intimidating," Rempt says, and resists being redesigned. "Then there's the need to figure out a way to access favorite brush presets with shortcuts, which is coupled with the problem that newcomers to Krita have issues with the various ways of actuating an eraser mode. All those things need careful thought and then a final decision on the approach. We haven't found any consensus here yet."

Artwork by Tyson Tan CC BY-SA 4.0 [11]

Roadmaps and Reasons

All in all, Krita 3.0 is a combination of careful planning and opportunity. "Making 2016 the Year of Vector and Text has been on the roadmap for two, three years," Rempt says. "Animation came out of the blue, though."

Like most maintainers, Rempt wishes for more developers. However, having managed several successful crowdfunding campaigns, he hopes that in the future, more developers can be hired full-time to write major features. "We're right now in a kind of awkward situation, sort of suffering from growing pains – the user base is getting big enough that it becomes quite hard to keep up with the feedback, whether in the form of bugs or wishes."

Still, although developing Krita can be challenging, Rempt sounds like he has no doubt about the value of it:

"In this day and age, you have to do digital art, or you're not in the same place as the other artists. But the big, important, recognized tools are closed source and out of reach for many people. They're also [proprietary], so artists cannot experiment with changing their tools.

"And that's, in the end, a big reason why I'm working on Krita. I almost haven't got time to paint or sculpt anymore, but that doesn't matter that much: What matters is that we're creating something that gives people with the urge to create art a tool that's available to all of them, that allows them to compete, and that they can change and experiment with, and that can never, ever be taken away from them."