Solstice

Digital painting · 0.2.0-beta · in testing

Painting, closer to the pen.

Solstice is an open-source painting application derived from Krita, built around a Vulkan GPU engine and workflows familiar from Clip Studio Paint.

Get trial buildsWindows x64 · development buildsView on GitHub

Windows 11 · 64-bit · free and open source

The Solstice logo over black and white ink brush strokes
Solstice main window painting its splash artwork, with Brush Presets, Quick Brush Adjustments, the Quick Access Palette, Layers and Tool Options
The Solstice main windowScreenshot

02HighlightsWhat Solstice adds

Krita, refined.

01

A brush on the GPU

Vulkan layer compositing and a GPU brush, on by default. Unsupported operations fall back to the CPU.

Pen input to displayed frame: about 5 ms, against 18–22 ms with the CPU brush (hand-drawn comparison, 2026-10-10).

Read the guide
02

Brush Stroke Layer

A paint layer that remembers its strokes and draws them again when scaled, so small line art enlarges without blurring.

Read the guide
03

Brush Presets

Every preset shows as a stroke preview. Filter by engine and bundle, and group the presets by bundle.

Read the guide
04

Tool Options

Mark a Brush Editor setting with an eye and it appears in Tool Options, under the current brush’s stroke preview.

Read the guide

03ScreenshotsCaptured in Solstice

See it at work.

Brush Presets docker grouped by bundle, with the Engines filter open
Brush Presets grouped by bundle
Brush Editor with eyes on brush tip settings, and the Brush section of Tool Options showing those settings
Brush settings in Tool Options
A small figure sketch and a copy enlarged and drawn again at the new size, on two Brush Stroke Layers
A Brush Stroke Layer, enlarged
A painted figure and a copy reposed with Puppet Warp: the Transform Tool's triangle mesh over the figure, with pins on the head, the shoulder, the raised arm, the waist and the legs, and the Puppet Warp Tool Options
A figure reposed with Puppet Warp

04GPU engineExperimental

Measured, with conditions.

The experimental engine composites supported RGBA32F and RGBA16F layers with Vulkan compute and shares the result with the OpenGL canvas. It is an ongoing rewrite, not a fully GPU-based painting pipeline.

  • On the GPU: layer compositing, the pixel brush in supported blend modes, and Transform, Liquify, Puppet Warp and Gaussian Blur on float layers.
  • Still on the CPU: dab and texture generation, masking, most filter calculations, and every unsupported operation.
  • Target hardware: NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Other architectures are not supported by this engine yet.
Engine operations, RGBA32F documentsCPUGPUShorter is faster · each row on its own scale
  • Resident full layer projection, 4096 × 4096, 16 layers4.4× faster
    CPU 254 ms
    GPU 58.2 ms
  • Canvas data preparation, 4096 × 4096, 8 layers640× faster
    CPU 1088 ms
    GPU 1.70 ms
  • Transform Tool apply, scale + rotate (bicubic), 2480 × 35087.3× faster
    CPU 470 ms
    GPU 64.1 ms
  • Gaussian Blur apply, radius 30, 2480 × 35083.4× faster
    CPU 213 ms
    GPU 62.0 ms

Measured on 2026-10-07 with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell (driver 596.86) using local development builds. Medians of three fresh processes, GPU completion included. These are specific engine operations, not frame rates or overall application performance; short complete strokes can still be slower on the GPU. Full results and limitations.

05Get SolsticeFree · open source

Try it today.

Option 1 · Trial build

Windows x64 development builds

Unsigned ZIP packages from manual GitHub Actions runs. They expire after seven days and are not stable releases.

Download pageBuild instructions

Option 2 · Source

Build from source

The primary development branch is main. Check the supported environment before building.

View source on GitHub

06Relationship to Krita

Built on Krita, maintained independently.

Solstice is derived from the Krita 6 codebase and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or supported by the Krita project or KDE. Please report Solstice issues tothe Solstice repository, not to Krita or KDE. Existing copyright notices and license terms remain applicable.