by The Krita perspective assistant system is the most complete built-in perspective kit in any free painting app: several assistant types, snapping that works with every brush, and a two-point grid with a real horizon. This guide sets up the Krita perspective grid three ways, explains snapping (the part that confuses most people), covers the fisheye and curvilinear assistants, and shows how to bring in a lens-accurate grid from this site when the built-in one is not enough. The reference is the Painting with Assistants chapter of the Krita manual; this is the version for someone drawing a building.
Painting assistants are Krita's on-canvas guides: rulers, ellipses, vanishing points and perspective grids that you place with the Assistant Tool. They are not layers and do not print; they are a drawing aid, and when Snap to Assistants is on, brush strokes are pulled along them. Several can be combined, each with its own colour and opacity, and the whole set can be saved to a file.
The Assistant Tool and the perspective types
Select the Assistant Tool in the toolbox (the ruler-and-point icon, grouped with the measure tool). The Tool Options docker then lists the assistant types; pick one and click on the canvas to place its points. The ones that matter for perspective:
Vanishing Point (one click) places a point that guide lines radiate from. Two of them on a common horizon give two-point perspective; three, with the third far above or below, give three-point. Krita draws the lines through the point in the direction of your stroke, which is what makes snapping to it feel like drawing along an invisible ruler.
2 Point Perspective (three clicks; Krita 5.0 and later) is the one to reach for. Click the left vanishing point, the right vanishing point and then a centre-of-vision point on the horizon between them, and Krita draws a horizon, a square-grid ground plane and a vertical ruler. The grid density is a slider in Tool Options, and the vertical ruler can be switched off. Because the two points define the horizon, the grid is guaranteed level.
Perspective (four clicks) is a grid on a single plane: click the four corners of the plane as it appears and Krita fills it with a distorted grid. It is the right tool for a floor, a wall or a tabletop, and it can be extended from its midpoint handles. It also drives the "perspective" brush sensor, which can scale a brush with depth.
Ruler, Infinite Ruler and Parallel Ruler (two clicks each) are the straight-line assistants. A Ruler is a segment; an Infinite Ruler extends beyond its two points, which makes it the horizon line; a Parallel Ruler snaps every stroke parallel to it, which is how you draw verticals in one- and two-point perspective, or axonometric drawings with three of them.
Fish Eye Point and Curvilinear Perspective are covered below.
Setting up a scene
For a building seen from a corner: place a 2 Point Perspective assistant with the two vanishing points well outside the canvas (zoom out first; a normal lens puts them roughly a canvas-width out on each side), and the centre-of-vision click at the middle of the picture. That gives horizon, ground grid and verticals in one assistant.
For a corridor or a room seen straight on: an Infinite Ruler for the horizon, a Vanishing Point on it for the receding lines, and a Parallel Ruler set vertical for the uprights. Two Vanishing Points on the same Infinite Ruler give a hand-built two-point setup with more control than the packaged one.
For a tilted view: add a third Vanishing Point above (looking up) or below (looking down), far off the canvas; verticals snap to it instead of to a Parallel Ruler. How to draw 3-point perspective explains where it goes.
Hold Shift while dragging a handle to snap it horizontally or vertically to the others, which is how you keep two vanishing points on the same horizon by hand. Each assistant can be given its own colour and opacity in Tool Options (Krita 4.1 and later), so a horizon can be dark and the grid faint.
Snapping
Snapping is separate from placing, and it lives with the brush, not the assistant. Select the Freehand Brush tool and in its Tool Options tick Snap to Assistants. Every stroke now follows whichever assistant is nearest to where it started: begin a stroke along a wall's edge and it locks to that wall's vanishing point.
Tick Snap Single too. Without it, a long stroke can leave one assistant and grab another halfway; with it, the stroke stays on the assistant it started on. Snapping works with any brush preset, including textured ones, so ruled lines can still look painted. Untick Snap to Assistants for freehand details; the assistants stay visible either way.
Snapping only applies to the freehand brush. The Line tool and shape tools ignore assistants, and vector layers do not use them.
Fisheye and curvilinear perspective
Fish Eye Point (two clicks, a third to set the circle) represents a set of parallel lines in space as curves, the way an extreme wide-angle lens sees them. Two of them at right angles, with a Vanishing Point, cover most fisheye drawings.
Curvilinear Perspective (Krita 5.3 and later) does it more rigorously: lines are drawn as circular arcs converging on two vanishing points, and combining assistants gives four-, five- and six-point perspectives. While dragging, Alt moves along the horizon, Ctrl rotates and Ctrl+Shift changes the field of view. If you have not drawn curvilinear perspective before, curvilinear perspective explained covers where the five points go; the curvilinear grid here draws the true spherical projection at any angle of view, which is useful for checking that the arcs you have placed agree with a real 180° lens.
Saving, hiding and reusing assistants
Assistants are saved inside the .kra file, so they come back when you reopen it. To reuse a setup across files, the Assistant Tool's Tool Options has Save and Open buttons for a .paintingassistant file containing every assistant on the canvas: keep one per lens and view you use often. Hide or show them all with View → Show Painting Assistants; hide one with the eye icon in its small handle toolbar, delete it with the X, and move the whole assistant with the move handle.
Bringing in a lens-accurate grid
The 2 Point Perspective assistant is a proper grid, but it does not know what lens it represents, cannot be rotated by an angle, and has no tilt, so matching a photograph or a film frame is guesswork. For that, set up the grid here and place the assistants on top of it.
- Open the 2-point grid (or the 3-point grid for a tilted camera). Drag to set the rotation, choose the lens in millimetres, set the camera height, match the aspect ratio to your canvas.
- Download a transparent PNG at 2×, or the SVG.
- In Krita: Layer → Import/Export → Import Layer (or drag the file onto the canvas and choose Insert as New Layer). Lower the layer's opacity to 30–40% and lock it.
- Zoom out and place a 2 Point Perspective assistant with its two points where the red lines and the green lines converge; the grid shows the horizon, so the centre-of-vision click goes on it at the picture's middle. Now the assistant snaps and the imported grid supplies metre squares and a one-metre cube for sizing.
- Hide the grid layer for the final image; keep the assistants.
To draw over a photo, run it through the vanishing point finder first: it reads the horizon, vanishing points and lens, and opens the matching grid, so the assistants you place from that grid will agree with the photo.
Common problems
Strokes don't snap. Snap to Assistants is off in the Freehand Brush's Tool Options, or you are using the Line tool, which never snaps. Check the checkbox and the tool.
Strokes snap to the wrong assistant. Snap Single is off, or the stroke started nearer another assistant. Turn Snap Single on and start the stroke closer to the line you mean.
The 2 Point Perspective option is missing. It arrived in Krita 5.0; update, or build the same thing from an Infinite Ruler and two Vanishing Points.
Everything looks like a fisheye. The vanishing points are inside the canvas. Zoom out and drag them further apart; the vanishing point distance calculator gives the spacing for a given lens.
Assistants vanished. View → Show Painting Assistants is off, or the assistant's eye icon was toggled.
Related
Clip Studio's perspective ruler · Procreate's drawing guide · GIMP's perspective tool · how to draw perspective
Questions
How do I add a perspective grid in Krita?
Select the Assistant Tool in the toolbox, pick 2 Point Perspective in its Tool Options, and click three times on the canvas: the two vanishing points and a centre-of-vision point. For a one-point view use one Vanishing Point assistant plus a Ruler for the horizon; for a flat plane, the Perspective assistant (four corners).
How do I make my brush snap to the perspective assistant in Krita?
With the Freehand Brush tool, tick Snap to Assistants in the Tool Options docker. Strokes then follow the nearest assistant. Tick Snap Single as well so a stroke sticks to the one assistant it started on instead of jumping between them.
Where did Krita's perspective grid tool go?
The old Perspective Grid tool was retired in Krita 4; its job is done by the assistants. The Perspective assistant gives a four-corner plane grid, and 2 Point Perspective (Krita 5.0 and later) draws a full two-point grid with a horizon.
Can I save Krita assistants and reuse them?
Yes. With the Assistant Tool active, Tool Options has Save and Open buttons for a .paintingassistant file holding every assistant on the canvas. Assistants are also stored inside the .kra file itself.
Does Krita have a fisheye or curvilinear perspective assistant?
Two: Fish Eye Point (a curved-line assistant for a pair of vanishing points) and, from Krita 5.3, Curvilinear Perspective, which draws lines as circular arcs converging on two vanishing points and can be combined into four-, five- and six-point setups.
How do I hide or delete an assistant in Krita?
With the Assistant Tool active, each assistant shows a small toolbar at one handle: an X deletes it, the eye toggles it, and the move handle drags it. Hide all of them with View → Show Painting Assistants, and stop snapping without hiding by unticking Snap to Assistants in the brush's Tool Options.