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MyPaint lets you draw beautiful freehand pictures
I love freehand painting. While I have absolutely no talent, I love the freedom of working with paint or even crayons. It just feels nice, even if the result is nothing to write home about (in my case, at least).
If you're looking to replicate the same experience on a computer, there's always Corel Painter. But on the off chance that you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend just to doodle, MyPaint gives you a nice chunk of functionality for the even nicer price of... free.
The program comes with many brushes that are divided into several categories. The brushes seem to work quite well at default settings. In case you want to tweak something, though, hitting Ctrl+B shows the Brush Settings dialog, which has a mind-boggling array of parameters that you can change for the brush you've selected.
The interface is multi-windowed but is not as horrible as GIMP's (sorry, GIMP lovers). The color picker is quite advanced and features color-matching harmonies (which I completely failed to use in my creation shown above).
Right-clicking the canvas rotates between the last five colors selected, which is a very handy feature. The program also features a ton of single-stroke hotkeys for changing brush sizes, saving favorite brushes, and more. MyPaint even supports layers, and it is available for both Windows and Linux.
Bottom line: This is not a toy. Whether you are serious about painting software or just starting out MyPaint is a great option.
Comments
5
Subscribe to commentsN900May 25th 2010 5:09PM
I kinda like this better than I like Corel Painter 11. It's simple and lightweight. Tried it out and made a quick picture. It's definitely worth the download if you like to sketch quick things.
TatsuyameMay 25th 2010 8:37PM
Yay, a MyPaint mention! While you might have to wait a while for Windows builds that are up to date, I have honestly not found a program that has balanced features with visual simplicity. There are a lot of behind the scenes dials and sliders to mess with for brushes, but it's really easy to just start painting. With Painter, I get overwhelmed (not to mention my computer can't really handle it) and Gimp was just not made for painting. MyPaint fits that magical niche perfectly. (especially since the new layers dialog was added!)
Sidenote: I have trouble with the new color selector, it doesn't seem to like pure black or pure white (however what it does like is close enough; 2/2/2 for black is what I see most commonly showing up.) Not a big impact on painting, and fiddling over the colors too much takes away from the quick painting that is so easy to do in MyPaint.
nikescarMay 26th 2010 12:01AM
I like MyPaint a lot. The program is incredibly lightweight. So much so that it runs without a hitch on any Atom N270 netbook. I have an Asus 900HA that I threw a resitive touchscreen on. You'd think this would be a match made in heaven but unfortunately there a bug that causes a trail to be drawn from the end of my last brush stroke to the beginning of the next stroke. So disappointing. It makes it unusable for me. This is an old issue that the devs don't seem interested in correcting.
Great program otherwise though.
StevenMay 26th 2010 1:07AM
Here's a cool video of one of the artists on the Sintel Open Movie Project using a combination of MyPaint, GIMP, and another cool program called Alchemy:
http://vimeo.com/6143607
it's a long video, but it's always interesting to watch an artist go from a blank digital canvas to finished product--using only open source tools, in this case.
porkymooreMay 26th 2010 9:44AM
its wonderful..i can paint at work with this, drop the file in "dropbox"..go home and take the file out of the "dropbox' at home. and extract the file and it will open in photoshop or painter..and its very easy to use!!1..3 thumbs up