1. Bare basics

  • Pan: spacebar and drag with mouse, or middle click and drag.

  • Zoom: mouse wheel or plus/minus buttons.

  • Selection: All (ctrl+A), None (ctrl+shift+A).

  • Color picker: Ctrl+Click.

Tip
 Adding a vector layer makes shapes added into it vector-based.

2. Meta/Misc

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/CC0Textures/

  • 1920x1080 is claimed to be the preferred resolution for YT thumbnails.

  • https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72431?hl=en#zippy=%2Cimage-size-resolution

    Your custom thumbnail image should be as large as possible. It will be used as the preview image in the embedded player. We recommend your custom thumbnails:

    • Have a resolution of 1280x720 (with minimum width of 640 pixels).

    • Be uploaded in image formats such as JPG, GIF, or PNG.

    • Remain under the 2MB limit.

    • Try to use a 16:9 aspect ratio as it’s the most used in YouTube players and previews.

  • Maybe the one with bigger resolution is good enough.

2.1. Pretty backgrounds from the games

  • AR0410 Lavok’s hideout

  • AR0411 Planar Sphere entry level

  • AR0516 Planar Prison

  • AR0602 Chez Irenicus start

  • AR0700 Waukeen’s Promenade

  • AR0714 Waukeen’s Promenade debris only

  • AR1008 Twisted Rune

  • AR1100 Umar Hills

  • AR1200 Windspear

  • AR6000 Abazigal’s entry

3. Adding images

  • Importing it as a layer seems to be the most common way.

When dragging and dropping an image to Krita, I get: * Insert as New Layer * Insert as New File Layer * Open in New Document * Insert as Reference Image

Inserting as new file layer makes Krita reference the file you imported. Maybe if you import as new layer instead, doesn’t?

Reference images are not explained in the docs, but seem to have this traits: * Can be embedded on the KRA file or refer to an external file. * Don’t appear in any layer, so can’t be hidden/changed this way. * Don’t appear on the exported result (PNG/JPG). * Can still receive some simple transformations (scale, rotate, color…​).

Hence, reference images seem to be the ones that we DO NOT want, as seem more tailored for people who want to paint something using that image as "source".

4. Ideas for making a thumbnail

  • Use a "frame" with a color and an icon in the corner, for "branding".

5. Adding pretty text

5.1. Approach 1

  • Add text with the tool. Just black color and the text normally.

  • Change the layer style to add effects.

  • Drop shadow, outer glow, and gradient overlay.

  • Gradient overlay:

    • Add a custom stop gradient picking up two yellow variants as start/stop.

6. Background

  • Add a filter layer after the background with a bit of a gaussian blur.