Because I run portable on my dude

Welcome to MyPaint

Man, how long has it been since I actually wrote a blog post? And one like this, a review of all things?

As some of you who know me might have known, I am currently running Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” on my laptop.

While on Ubuntu when I just upgraded to 10.04 LTS, as an owner of a drawing tablet – I realize I’m unable to use my favorite drawing tools like what I had in Windows, namely Photoshop and SAI, especially the latter – natively in a Linux distribution. The switch to Ubuntu (although I did not remove Windows, just… it seems I have been forgetting to log in to Windows – intentionally) makes the switch feel a bit hard especially when I’m missing the Stabilizer feature of SAI, however I do realize I can’t be too dependent on that and it’d be best if I try to explore alternatives, as GIMP (even with the GIMP for Painters patch installed) and Inkscape does not prove to be the most favorable.

However, a simple search

apt-cache search wacom

returned me with a rather eye-catching result: one of them reads

mypaint - Paint program to be used with Wacom tablets

And so I proceeded to install it with apt-get install. Gentlemen, I introduce you, MyPaint. Which, as of current, is now at version 0.9.1.

MyPaint's interface

The interface of MyPaint is simple, and is easily distinguishable. MyPaint’s tagline is “to let you focus on the drawing without getting too bothered by the UI.” The GIMP 2.6-ish arrangement of windows seems a bit unsettling, but it provides a set of simple shortcuts which you can get accustomed to quickly (and might get you doing it in other painting programs you might have, so says someone here). Up there in my screenshot features the main canvas window, the brushes, palette, and the layers, which is enough for me on standard terms. You can hide all of the floating tools so that you can have a full view of the canvas and reveal them later when you need them or just reveal the one you need and hide it again.

With a measly installation size of around 1.6MB (for me, I don’t know how it varies between users) and for you Windows users, at MyPaint’s download page there’s a link that leads you to an 8MB installer, this painting program packs quite one hell of a punch; I think to dub it as one of the most powerful tablet-friendly, free and open-source painting programs around wouldn’t be too much of a praise. Also, thanks to its unlimited canvas feature, you can pretty much pretend you have one hell of a large tablet and draw your artwork while zoomed out at maximum and keep drawing as far as your hardware takes you. You read that right, it is possible to draw something large enough not even your hardware can take it (but please don’t if you value your time doing your work) – I accidentally drew up to 20,000 pixels wide; 20 times larger than my actual screen resolution (whoops!) and since I already got so many colors in, it became very taxing for my i7 equipped with 4GB of RAM laptop (laugh).

Also, MyPaint uses a file format unique to its own – actually, it’s being developed as an open standard for other applications, as of current one of the applications I knew of that utilizes it is Krita – which I gave up upon for some weird reason (It fails to start, or looks like its attempting to but is gradually eating RAM and CPU time but did not manage to launch), and I got to say it is very light, which will mean less space used for archiving your artworks.

MyPaint sports a plethora of brushes you can choose to use or test around width if you need to choose one that suits your style, and I have to say “lots” would be an understatement – because most of the time I probably use almost less than a dozen brushes (excluding the erasers), or maybe a bit more than that but to be honest, until today there are more than two dozens of MyPaint’s brushes that I never touched. Yet.

Brushes in MyPaint

One of the appeals of MyPaint is its portability between various platforms such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X – and with the added benefit of Nokia’s Maemo which runs on the Nokia N900 being based off Debian, there are now MyPaint packages available for it. Here’s a video demonstrating its use in Nokia N900, courtesy of Luovatone:

Cons

Of course, as well as benefits, there are disadvantages of using MyPaint as well – to start, if you need to work on a document which has a restriction on size, it can get pretty tricky and messy when MyPaint comes into the fray – MyPaint does not come with a size limit, so you will have to set the document size limit in another application such as GIMP. More added benefit if you have the OpenRaster file save/load plugin for GIMP (which is installed by default in GIMP 2.7 but strangely it doesn’t work with me, a bug perhaps?), but even with that… after you’re done with MyPaint, MyPaint has the tendency to add unwanted pixels into your artwork as it sees fit, and you might have to resize your artwork again in GIMP back to the size you want it in.

I believe I set the page to be A4-sized and yet when I save it in MyPaint...

Also since MyPaint is almost totally dedicated to be a program to draw and paint pictures in, you lack the usual tools you would most be comfortable of in GIMP or Photoshop, which leaves very little room for adjustments/corrections – such as the rectangle selection tool. But right now there is a discussion on making selection tools implemented from the wiki, although with the way I already got myself accustomed in having MyPaint included in my to-do lists of drawing, I think it’ll be fine for me to not include that (actually, I’d rather be presented with an option to disable it from my plain sight, heh).

Conclusion

To put it simply, MyPaint is the most powerful painting programs I’ve used… ever. GIMP? Not liking its integration of tablets much. Inkscape? I think I work faster and more accurately with the mouse. Krita? Somehow failed for me as of current, and something just doesn’t feel good when I used it for the first time. Well, in the first place the reason for me writing this up is to give it some credit I think I should be saying as thanks to the developers.

If you’re an owner of a drawing tablet and are considering using a Linux distribution on your workstation, this might well be your drawing software of choice.

And as a final verdict, I’ll list down some dumbed-down impressions I have of it, on a scale of 1-5.

Features: 5/5, as a software that is dedicated to letting you do what you love the most with your tablet – drawing, it pretty much does it best in letting you do the drawing, stays out of the way and keeps you focused.

Usefulness: 4.5/5, excellent usefulness it just screams that you must use it with your hands moving on its own. (Pardon me on that last part, it was a joke). Although some work might be in order to make it less painful to work with documents that have size limits.

Stability: 5/5. If there’s something that can make MyPaint fail to do its job, it’ll be your computer crashing on its own and not by Mypaint’s fault, or you drew things too large it takes too much time for MyPaint to re-render it/save it into a PNG file if you did(whoa), but it pretty much does that with maximum stability – provided you don’t burn your processor in the process, heh.

User Interface (UI): 4/5. While its window layout seems a bit GIMP 2.6-ish, it does not distract you by having too much tools packed in a single window – as every window lists specific needs you have in your artwork. One for layers, one for brushes, another for editing brush parameters (not shown in the default layout – the screenshot I have), and another for colors. What more can you expect?

Also, to be reminded – Mypaint is on constant development, one of the ways you can help is by testing – refer here for details.

And as a closing, I’ll post here an artwork I have done using MyPaint – and edited using GIMP. I think its one of my best efforts with MyPaint so far, and also the latest.

Sample. Sorry, I only made a Japanese version of this. Text inserted using Inkscape.

Honoo out.