Brief: Open source painting application MyPaint 2.0 has been released with new features and improvements. Check out what’s new and how to get the latest MyPaint on Linux.
MyPaint 2.0
MyPaint is one of the top open source alternatives to Microsoft Paint. It’s a handy little tool that allows you to quickly sketch and draw. While there are more sophisticated open source tools for digital artists like Krita, MyPaint is not too bad for light sketching.
You can also use it on Wacom touch devices without much trouble.
MyPaint has a major new release with support for Python 3, new layer mode, new brush parameters among other changes.
New features in MyPaint 2.0
Here are the new changes in this major release:
- Linear compositing and spectral blending (pigment).
- Layer views.
- Brush strokes dependent on view rotation and view zoom.
- Additional symmetry modes: vertical, vertical+horizontal, rotational, snowflake.
- Expanded flood fill functionality: offset, feather, gap detection and more.
- New brush settings: offsets, gridmap, additional smudge settings, posterize, pigment.
- New brush inputs: barrel rotation, base radius, zoom level, gridmap x/y, direction 360, attack angle.
Apart from that there are plenty of minor changes as well that improve the overall experience with MyPaint:
- Full Python3 support (Python2 still supported)
- Switch to PyGI
- New Import Layers feature
- Progress feedback for loading/saving
- New Layer Views
- Spectral mixing
- Curve editor points snaps on 0.5 increments
- Maximum input mapping curve points increased to 64
The new release also features plenty of bug fixes.
Installing MyPaint 2.0 on Linux
It will take some time before your distribution provides MyPaint 2.0 (if it provides at all). An easier and more convenient way of using MyPaint 2 right now on Linux is via AppImage.
MyPaint 2 is available in an AppImage format that you can download from its GitHub repository, give it execute permission and run it.
The source code and other installation options are available on the release page.
Conclusion
The new release looks good. If you try MyPaint 2.0, do share your experience.