Fading Memories

I first became aware of MyPaint quite some time ago, when the author appeared on the Krita mailing list. Since then, I've been following this application quite closely, updating and building nearly daily. Although it resembles Art Rage, MyPaint isn't a little toy application, and I'm very impressed with it.

It really does allow sketching as if you were working on paper When I was trying out the charcoal brushes, I suddenly noticed myself trying to smudge the lines with my thumb. Well, despite having a touchscreen on my laptop, that didn't work!

MyPaint has the following impressive features, among others:

• Support for OpenRaster -- which makes it easy to work with MyPaint and Krita in one workflow. (If you use Krita 2.x, preferably Krita trunk.)
• 16-bit layers for smoother painting
• really impressive brush engine. I think it would be easy enough to make a plugin for krita that re-uses this brush engine and make krita work with all MyPaint brushes, but whether it would perform well enough is an open question.
• Smooth, smooth, smooth! And performs really well.
• And most importantly: an almost natural feel when painting.
• A very active development community with lots of interesting stuff happening.

One disadvantage for me is that it really is designed for the situation where you have a tablet in front of you and a keyboard aside, under your secondary hand. This means that if I use my X61t in tablet mode, I cannot easily access the brush palette or the colors. This is a design feature, though, and one of the places where MyPaint differs most from Art Rage. (The other is that Art Rage is not only closed-source software, but also not as good an artists' tool by a long chalk.).

Blog with a screenshot:

I love interoperability:

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I recently got my hands on the source code for a painting application written from 1991 to 1993 by a EPITA students in France -- Olivier Brand, Olivier Raoul, Olivier Lahaye, Olivier Coquet, Frederic Losacco, Frederic Gaubert, Bertrand le Vern en Cedric Marsot. Their painting application -- a school project -- is called Rainbow and is a treasure trove of advanced ideas.

Apart from the custom real-time dithering X server that's included somewhere, the version of the code Olivier Lahaye managed to retrieve for me from an ageing MIPS machine can paint using on-the-fly computed textures, deform an image by distorting a grid and lot, lots more. A very cool magic wand implementation.

More advanced code is somewhere on a possibly broken Amiga harddisk. Or not, but Olivier Lahaye is trying to hunt it out for me. This includes a SIOX-like algorithm for foreground selection and an intelligent fill routine that was able to texture an image of a green car in the countryside. Select the car, select fill: presto: a wooden car with all the shadows intact. Painting with just intensity. Paint with color, but not intensity.

To put this into context: in August 1995 Kimball and Mattis started on the Gimp. XPaint seems to have started in 1991, one year after Rainbow. Try to imagine what the libre graphics world would have looked like if an application with the capabilities of Rainbow would have been released under an open source license in 1993!

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A new crop of painting applications: Photoshop CS2, Deep Paint, Corel Painter IX and Microsoft Code Named Acrylic. Deep Paint is a gratis download nowadays, after having been discontinued by its company. Visit download.com to get it. Acrylic is Microsoft's Adobe killing bargain basket purchase from Hong Kong. Corel Painter IX, finally, is much, much, much better than the previous garbage. Oh, and I found a screenshot of the old Procreate Painter I got with my Wacom pad.

Read more ...

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Warning: this is a very, very vertical blog entry... It's about toolboxes.

I'm busy redesigning the way Krita uses its toolbox. As you can see, we have a lot of buttons, and they are badly organized.

Currently, we've got an ordinary toolbar with all our tools, more or less like Paintshop Pro, with fold out buttons to select more specialized buttons.

This is similar to Photoshop, which looks a little more disorganized. perhaps because of the two columns.

Another style, one that is more often used with paint applications, is that of Procreate Painter. Here, we find a small set of tools. There's one central, tool, a single paintbrush that is used for all the freehand paint effects.

This the style that Corel Painter IX uses:

Deep paint 2D is practically the same as Corel Painter IX, except that the order of the buttons is different:

Finally, Microsoft Code Named Acrylic follows this lead but manages to have small, almost unrecognizable icons:

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In my last about this subject I said I'd discovered a few more paint apps for Windows. These were:

• Ambient Design: Art Rage
• Right(Hemisphere :Deep Paint
• Nature Painter: Nature Painter Digital Canvas
• Eusoftware: Wizardbrush

Add to that: e-Paint and the experimental and academic Chinese Painting on Phantom by Jeng-Sheng Yeh, Pei-Ken Chang and Ting-Yu Lien. Furthermore, there's Gsumi, which does a nice liquid ink stroke, and Wet, which run on Linux.

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While I'm bravely forging with Krita, I'm very well aware that mine is not the only game in town, and that it's often a good idea to check out what other people are doing. An interesting conclusion is that natural-media type paint apps must be easy to do, since there are several cheap options that are really good. So: here's an overview of what I've found floating about on the net. Most of it is Windows stuff; all of it trialware. Here's my very cursory survey:

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