This page is OUTDATED. Go to the new mypaint homepage instead.

Goal

To have a free painting program, I mean painting with lots of brushes and pressure sensitivitiy settings. Not so much image manipulation, not so many effects. If you are looking for well-tested software, try this overview instead.

Projects found

The GIMP. Of course, you can do paintings with the gimp. But the pressure sensitivity options are crude. There are only four checkboxes. No way to make, for example, the radius smaller on high pressure. Also, gimp is a monster: compiling it takes an afternoon, finding out where to hack it probably much longer. So I'm looking for smaller projects.

Wetdream (server down?), a prototype program for water color, in the hope to have this in the gimp.

DigiPencil Realistic color pencil simulation - started from Wetdream, now part of a gimp plugin: PhymodMedia. Nice if you want a more natural media, but doesn't seem to have many options to play around with.

FlexlayPaint. An interesting work-in-progress painting program with supports infinit zoom. It is part of a 2D game development suite, with tablet support, but I haven't tried it.

Those projects I was not aware of when I started:

Krita (KDE, C++) is aiming for the same goal, has an impressive number of contributors listed, already seems to support watercolor and many image depths. I have not yet found configurable brushes, but I haven't tried long because the program is unbearably slow on my PC for even the simplest tiny strokes. (Update: the speed problem is gone, and it even allows custom pressure curves now.)

Gogh (pure python + pygtk) is relatively new, and already supports layers, different blending modes and undo. I expected this approach to be very slow, but it really is not.

And finally mypaint, my own prototype program which has grown up quite a bit now.

home