Krita Brush & Painting Shortcuts

Brush size on the bracket keys is nearly universal across painting software, but Krita's implementation is proportional rather than fixed. A single press moves a 400-pixel brush by a large absolute amount and a 6-pixel brush by a tiny one, so the number of presses needed to travel between blocking-in and detail work stays roughly constant regardless of where you start. It also means the same key feels different depending on the preset loaded, which surprises people who expect a consistent step. When you need an exact diameter rather than a relative nudge, holding Shift and dragging horizontally on the canvas shows the numeric size as it changes. Erase mode on E is the binding that most distinguishes Krita from general image editors, and it is regularly misread as broken. E does not switch to an eraser tool, because there is no eraser tool to switch to — it flips the brush already in your hand into subtractive mode. A textured bristle brush erases with that texture; a soft airbrush erases softly. This matters most when erasing into an existing painted edge, where a generic hard eraser would leave a mechanical boundary that no subsequent stroke quite hides. The trade-off is that the brush you erase with is whichever one you last painted with, so an unexpectedly aggressive erase usually means the preset, not the shortcut. Colour handling is where Krita offers something with no real Photoshop equivalent. X swaps foreground and background, D resets them to black and white, and L and K push the current colour lighter and darker in steps. That last pair is the interesting one: it lets a painter build a value ramp while painting, stepping up and down through tones without going near a colour selector, which keeps attention on the canvas during exactly the part of the process where breaking concentration costs most. The D reset is worth knowing for a second reason — black and white are not aesthetic choices on a mask, they are the two values that mean hide and reveal, so D is effectively 'give me the mask painting colours'. Opacity on O and I adjusts the tool, not the layer. The distinction sounds pedantic and causes real confusion: a stroke laid down at reduced brush opacity onto a layer that is itself partly transparent compounds the two, and the result looks far weaker than the number in the brush settings suggests. If strokes are coming out faint after you have already raised brush opacity, the layer opacity in the docker is the place to look. Two supporting bindings round the set out. Ctrl held while painting samples a colour and hands control straight back to the brush on release, which is the right tool for picking a neighbouring tone mid-stroke; P switches to the colour picker tool properly and stays there, which is what you want when you need its options, such as sampling the merged image rather than the active layer. And F5 opens the brush editor for the current preset while F6 opens the preset chooser — one edits the brush you have, the other replaces it, and reaching for the wrong one of the pair is the most frequent moment of confusion in Krita's interface. Filling is the one painting action here that is not brush work at all. Shift+Backspace floods the layer, or the active selection if there is one, with the foreground colour; plain Backspace does the same with the background colour. Adding Ctrl to either respects the layer's existing opacity rather than overwriting it wholesale, which matters when filling onto a layer that already carries partial transparency you want to preserve. These are instant operations, and reaching for them instead of covering a region with strokes is the difference between a second and half a minute on any area larger than a thumbnail. A note on how these bindings fit together in practice. The reason Krita hands single letters to painting actions rather than reserving them is that a painter's left hand rests on the keyboard while the right holds a stylus, and every modifier combination that hand has to form is a small interruption to a stroke in progress. Size on brackets, opacity on O and I, value on L and K, erase on E, colour swap on X — all of these are reachable without the hand leaving its resting position. Judged as a keymap in the abstract it is crowded and inconsistent; judged as an interface for one hand operating alongside a tablet, the crowding is the design working as intended, and it is the reason most Krita users end up keeping the defaults rather than switching to the Photoshop-compatible scheme once the first week is behind them.