Krita

Powerful open source studio for digital painting and animation

Krita brings its well-known desktop art toolkit to touch-driven devices, offering a surprisingly complete studio for illustrators, comic artists, and animators on the go. It focuses squarely on serious creation, not casual doodling, and it shows from the very first brush stroke.

The interface is clearly adapted from the desktop version, which means you get a professional layout with docks, panels, and customizable workspaces. On larger screens like tablets and Chromebooks this works very well, giving you room for layers, color wheels, brush presets, and reference images, while still leaving a generous canvas area. A dedicated canvas-only mode helps you hide distractions when you just want to paint.

Krita shines with its brush engines: from pencils and inks to textured and particle-style brushes, the variety is impressive, and stroke stabilizers make lineart and inking feel smooth and controlled. The layer system is equally robust, supporting clone layers, masks, and blending modes for non-destructive workflows. Comic and storyboard artists will appreciate the project management tools, as well as support for PSD and other common formats.

Animation is another strong point. Onion skinning, a timeline, and frame-by-frame workflows make it suitable for creating animatics and short animations directly within the app.

However, this is a beta release and not yet ready for mission-critical work. Expect occasional performance hiccups or interface quirks, especially on weaker hardware. It is also clearly tuned for large screens, so smaller devices are not supported.

Overall, Krita is an exciting, feature-rich option for digital artists who want a true studio environment and are willing to accept a few rough edges while the beta matures.