Earlier this week, Krita Foundation successfully raised the money to fund 6 months of work on the increasingly popular free digital painting application for Linux and Windows.

The campaign launched on May 4. Two weeks into the fundraiser, 643 backers brought €20K (the baseline for the project to succeed), then 322 more pledged another €10,520. Additionally, the team received €3,108 donations via PayPal and will use that money to work on features from the list of 24 stretch goals.

Much like last year, the team started working on some of the stretch goals already during the fundraiser: modifier keys for selections, stacked brushes, basics of memory management (reporting if you are about to overuse RAM). The upcoming stable v2.9.5 release will feature these an many other newly added features and fixes.

File size warning in Krita

In the coming days developers will be processing submitted surveys from users who pledged €15+ and thus got the right to vote for stretch goals, then continue working on both core tasks — performance boost and animation — and the stretch goals.

Both Google Summer of Code projects — animation and tangent normal map brush engine — are being actively worked on. You read Jouni Pentikäinen's blog to follow his progress on animation.

Meanwhile the team published several interviews with artists who depend on Krita in their work, including David Revoy. A longer and very insightful interview with David was also done by Erik Moeller; it focuses on topics such as art, merits of different licenses, crowdfunding models etc.