The Krita Foundation was created in 2013 to provide support for Krita's development. As a result, the development gained speed and resulted in better performance and stability. Also from that point, the project began to experiment with various ways of funding its development, including Google Summer of Code and funded jobs for students. Ī change of direction happened to the project in 2009, with a new goal of becoming digital painting software like Corel Painter and SAI. In years between 20, Krita was developed as a generic image manipulation software like Photoshop and GIMP. The first public version of Krita was released with KOffice 1.4 in 2004. To avoid existing trademarks on the market, the project underwent numerous name changes: KImageShop, Krayon, until it was finally settled with 'Krita' in 2002.

In 1999, Matthias Elter proposed the idea of building the software using CORBA around ImageMagick. The idea of building a Qt-based image editor was later passed to KImage, maintained by Michael Koch, as a part of KOffice suite. Early development of the project can be tracked back to 1998 when Matthias Ettrich, founder of KDE, showcased a Qt GUI hack for GIMP at Linux Kongress.

Brushes for paint tool sai 2