There's a new king in town! (Goodbye Krita!)

That's it, I bought Paintstorm Studio, while I like Krita more than Photoshop, I've had some fundamental issues with it, the good thing is that as a programmer I could fix them, but the reality is that I'm too busy being an artist to be a programmer right now so it's time for Krita to be shelved for me.



Paintstorm may not be free, but it's dirt cheap, $20 for a lifetime subscription with ALL future updates is chump change, and it's developers trust in their work's capabilities well enough to provide a free 30 day trial just so you can be sure if you like it or not.

I have barely tested Paintstorm properly, I'm still just trying to adjust to it and it 's brush engine, I have a lot of testing to do before I can get painting in it (but admittedly I was basically doing the same in Krita) the main problem I have with Krita is that their soft edges/soft brushes are messy af, so unless you paint in a rugged painterly style, your work will look messy, and while as I'm practicing I didn't mind this quirk THAT much, I kinda had to find a solution to this issue if I was gonna keep using Krita further down the line, and I think, when I finally actually found a solution (or was super close to one) I also found paintstorm which doesn't have the messy soft brush issue that krita does. (I just tested it, paintstorm's transitions are silky smoooooooth, maybe even smoother than photoshop I can go as far as zoom down to the pixels and I still struggle to see any banding or spacing marks with just the regular airbrush)


(If you have a subpar screen you may notice a lot of banding on the paintstorm and photoshop samples, but if you have a good screen there won't be any banding, however the annoying texture in the krita version is still there, this was done in all software with their default airbrush, made this just so you can see what I'm talking about)

Paintstorm has one thing over EVERY digital painting software out there (except Black INK, but that's an unfinished mess anyways so not worth much consideration)

That is SPEED! with it's GPU accelerated rendering, you can use complex brushes at huge sizes without any lag! as someone who likes to work at large resolution and have found basically every software lacking in speed at large resolutions, this is a no brainer, I want this feature, it makes digital painting so much more painless for me. But that's not all, obviously 

The one thing that truly made me want to use Krita was of course that it was the only serious painting software out there that supports Linux. But Paintstorm (bless em) are now gonna start competing with Krita in that space as well, they have a working Linux beta already! for reasons, I can't test it right now and for same reasons, I'm drawing on windows currently, but investing in paintstorm knowing that when I can get back to Linux it will work there as well is quite soothing for me, working on Linux is very important to me, it's simply a better work environment than windows and macOS thanks to it's limitless customization options (this means that you can optimize your workflow in any way you want and I have quite a good handful of optimizations that I simply can't have in windows, Windows doesn't allow you to re-bind system shortcuts like alt+f4, linux does, the possibly most important shortcut for me is that I have in linux 6 workspaces/virtual desktops all bound to their own keyboard key on my 'gaming' keyboard, but on Windows to get that you need to use buggy software, and even if windows 10 supports workspaces, microsoft are fucking retarded and don't let you keybind things like this, so they can eat all the damn dicks and then die gruesomely, I hate these fuckers for so many things)

Anyhow, that rant over.

Paintstorm has been really easy to adjust to, if you have a photoshop or krita background this will be the same for you, basically everything I look at in Paintstorm, I already know what is, and unlike most digital painting software, this software by design encourages users to create their own brushes, the default UI setup literally has all the advanced brush settings right in your face for you to toy with, and there's a lot of fancy settings I haven't seen in Krita there are some variables (some that I even actually used) that are missing for, the Distance variable is the only one I actually used that's missing, but there's also a time variable and a bunch of things I don't really know what do that krita has that this one doesn't, but there's nothing I'll sorealy miss, they have stroke speed, and stroke direction at least, and just like in krita, you can set the control variables for just about anything with the press of a button.

But in return for that downside they just have a bunch more settings. Settings like color amount, extends color (whatever that means), stroke gradient (looks shiny), dirty color mode whatever that means, and preserve main color, bristles (though krita had a bristle brush engine, it also had a color smudge engine that had a color amount setting admittedly, I used it for one of my brushes), there's also a texture contrast setting.

All in all they've kept this brush engine incredibly simple but also highly versatile. Unlike krita (much like photoshop) they also have a nifty 'stroke preview' for all brushes, this is very nice to have. It also has backwards compatibility with Photoshop's ARB brush format, so you can import photoshop brushes into this software which is quite impressive (but would be more impressive if they could do it with corel painter's brushes, that would be like the ultimate proof of superiority, still, I'm hopeful that Paintstorm's brush engine is good enough to topple the true king of digital painting, corel painter)

I do however not see a flow setting, Krita's flow setting was trash but I'm thinking maybe transparency is supposed to be flow (or even color amount...) why do they have opacity and transparency? what's the diff? I am confus now. (Difference is that what most programs call opacity this program calls transparency and what krita calls flow, this program calls opacity I think what photoshop calls flow this program calls color amount)

The UI customization options are second to none, you can even create your own custom UI elements (two of them) in other words if you only use 2 or 3 things in the UI, you can just put them into one box and remove all the other things from view. Another thing I'm impressed by is that they have ALL the most important UI elements, from brush settings to navigator, visible by default. there are only 3 windows not shown by default and you can enable them with the press of a button, there's a lot of shit that I've never used, and this gives me a chance to try them out and see if I want to use them in the first place. To make it all even more perfect, you can set a UI transparency setting, which allows you basically to have a window on your canvas and make it not completely block your view of your painting

I'm seeing a lot of untapped potential in the brush engine.

But it's defining feature right now, what it definitely has over everything else is speed. Those huge brushes that bring krita, corel painter and even photoshop TO THEIR KNEES, like literally you can't paint with them because it goes like 1 millimeter per 5 seconds if you try to (just in any of the programs, try setting a textured brush to 1000px, see how it works out) will only lag slightly in Paintstorm, this means that you can actually power through painting with such obscenely straining brushes  

This means that Paintstorm can do things that literally no other painting software can, just thanks to this feature alone. Artists like to paint at high resolutions, 4k painting resolution is pretty common these days, I've seen some go for 8k, if I could, I'd paint at 13k (I'm not even joking) and it looks like with paintstorm that would actually be achievable (albeit barely), there's one catch though.

To use Paintstorm's speed you need to have a dedicated GPU otherwise it lags like everything else. I know of at least one professional (or at least professional tier) artist who recently switched over to paintstorm primarily because of this speed.


(there's one bit of misinformation in the above video, photoshop does not have GPU accelerated brush engines. All digital painting software has GPU accelerated rendering, but only two of them have GPU accelerated brush engines, these two are Paintstorm and BlackINK. The reason for this is that graphical programming which is required to make such brush engines is basically the hardest form of programming there has ever been, coding in Vulkan, OpenGL or DirectX, these are the hardest things you can do as a programmer, and most programmers tend to sort of stay away from it which is why it's mostly only done for game engines like UE4 or CryEngine, where it's simply required) 

But one thing is clear, in this software's 'overview' (read: trailer) the main selling point is it's brush engine, this means that to the developers the brush engine was probably the single most important feature, and as they show, they did an amazing job (I just now noticed from that video I linked at the top, they have stroke post correction, that is one awesome feature, I will use it.)

It has the ability to merge two brushes with some mask brush thing, that is awesome, they have a very intuitive perspective ruler, I've always been pretty lazy about using perspective guides (which is really bad for a beginner like me, but I don't like drawing them!), but with this, I just might start using them more. Krita had some rulers like this as well but I did not find them intuitive thus never used them, but apparently it doesn't just stop there, you can bind your strokes to the vanishing points  now that... is cool. I will shamelessly abuse that.

For people who like painterly style they have impressive oil painting impression brushes, like seriously impressive, it almost looks like it's traditional.

It also has some nice features to make masking easier, for people who like to do cel shading and stuff. It can blend through layers, Krita can do this too though.

You can color-code your UI... That's new, that could really streamline the workflow if used right. And if I understood correctly, it even has per-brush keybindings. I'm not sure how to do that but that would be pretty overkill. They do however at least have 3 keybinding presets that you can configure as you want, that is enough for me, in fact it's enough for me that you can freely keybind everything

I'm truly impressed by this software, I think I'm gonna jump ship but since I already put in all this work over at krita to make some very unique brushes, I think I'll finish these brushes and upload them for anyone who wants em before.

I'm only just beginning to grasp what the brush engine can do, it's much more amazing than it seemed at first glance, I mean you can make two completely different brushes then merge them into one that is a seriously amazing feature. I feel like it's significantly easier to find the results you want with this brush engine than any I've ever used (including corel painter's which I just didn't understand, and photoshop's which is just too simple/dry of features) the best part about this engine is that you can basically enable all the features at the same time, whereas in most engines like Krita's where you have a lot of elaborate features it's either divided into separate brush engines, or you have to choose "this vs that" (like say smudge mode and dulling mode (known in paintstorm as blurring and extending color, which can both be on at the same time creating a blending tool superior to anything you'll find in krita and even photoshop!)
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.............................. Now that I think of it, seems sorta unfair that I've been using Krita almost since day one, and I have never actually finished an artwork in it... I can't just pump and dump like that!! Krita has served me pretty well until now, so as a farewell, I will despite my absolute lack of skill () paint my very first complete artwork, and do so in Krita with these brushes I made. It can double as a showcase for how good my brushes can be too

It'll also give me one last chance to fine-tune the brushes before releasing them

I'll upload the painting and the brushes when it's done, I'm hoping it'll take about 1 and a half days. Anyhow if you haven't already, try out paintstorm! It's really cool!

Also if you have issues with drawing every day, make sure to check out my last journal! enjoy paintstorm!
The real reason why you can't draw every dayProcrastination, mankind's worst enemy, destroyer of worlds, eater of souls... What very thing is causing me to procrastinate right this instant? Why am I writing this when I know I should be drawing? 
What causes me to lean towards distractions instead of getting done the job that I want and by every right should be doing? I was thinking about this the other day, a thought popped up "Internet Addiction", and I thought back to a time where I managed to establish that as soon as I drop an "addiction" or bad habit, another "addiction" or bad habit will pick up it's slack, if I stop playing games I start watching anime, if I stop watching anime I start browsing the internet, if I stop browsing the internet I return to games or anime. An endless loop the truth is there have been times where I eliminated all three, you know what happens then? I find another distraction, I end up reading manga instead. Stop that? I'd probably go read novels next. There's always another distraction you'l

Edit: Couple of days later...
Wishful thinking, I couldn't finish my Krita painting, but I got a bit further than I expected, and although it's hideous, the act of just doing it taught me a lot about how much I've actually improved without realizing it.



I made the textured brushes too anyhow, despite my failure to actually use them to their fullest potential, here are my awesome new Krita brushes.