Brushes · Krita Brush packs for Krita.
Krita is free, its brush engine is genuinely deep, and its own resource pages have been 404ing for years — so the honest answers about packs, formats and imports live scattered across forum threads. Here they are in one place, from people who build a brush engine for a living.
Two native formats, two import formats.
Native: the .bundle — presets, brush tips and patterns
packaged together — and the single-preset .kpp. Import:
Photoshop .abr and GIMP .gbr/.gih,
which carry the tip image only.
That last clause is the one the download sites skip. An imported
.abr gives Krita the stamp, not the stroke — pressure
curves, spacing and blending are engine-specific, so the brush
still needs its behaviour dialled in as a Krita preset. The same
is true in every direction, for every pair of apps:
textures move, settings do not. We wrote up
exactly what
transfers between formats and
the working
Procreate-to-Krita method.
Where do good packs come from? Krita ships with a strong default library, and its community distributes free bundles — judged by the same criteria as any pack: real texture sources, sensible pressure response, no filler. Check the licence before commercial work; here is what the terms actually mean.
.bundle
Krita’s pack format: presets, tips and patterns in one file, imported through resource management.
.kpp
One preset, one file. The unit a Krita brush actually lives in — a bundle is a box of these.
.abr / .gbr
Imports as a tip image only. The character arrives; the behaviour you rebuild in the preset editor.
.apexobrush
Our format. Not a Krita import, but a plain ZIP — the textures inside extract as ordinary images. The format, explained.
Krita brushes, answered.
What brush formats does Krita use?
Krita’s native formats are the .bundle (a resource bundle carrying presets, brush tips and patterns together) and the .kpp (a single brush preset). It can also import Photoshop .abr brush tips and GIMP .gbr/.gih brushes — but those carry only the tip image, not the behaviour, so you still tune the preset in Krita afterwards.
Can you use Procreate brushes in Krita?
Not directly, and no converter can do it faithfully — the two engines describe a brush too differently. What genuinely moves is the textures: a Procreate .brush is an archive, its stamp and grain extract as images, and Krita rebuilds an equivalent preset around them in a few minutes.
Do Apex Olira brush packs work in Krita?
Not as a direct import — Krita does not read .apexobrush, just as Apex Olira does not read .bundle. But a .apexobrush is a plain ZIP whose stamp and grain textures extract as ordinary images, so a pack you own can be rebuilt as a Krita preset for your own use the same way a Procreate brush can.
How do I install a brush bundle in Krita?
From Krita’s resource management (under the settings menu), import the .bundle file and restart if the presets do not appear immediately. A single .kpp preset can be dropped into the paintoppresets resource folder instead.
Why does a drawing-app studio write Krita guides? Because we build a cross-platform brush format and got stuck knowing the answers — the same reason the rest of the journal exists.