Free Drawing And Painting Program MyPaint 2.0.0 Alpha Released
After being in development for more than 2 years, MyPaint 2.0.0 alpha is available for download.
MyPaint is a free, open source drawing and painting program available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The application features infinite canvas, configurable brushes, graphics tablet support, and a distraction-free fullscreen mode, on top of a simple GTK+ 3 interface. It uses Open Raster as its default file format, but it also supports saving images to PNG or JPEG.
MyPaint 2.0.0 alpha includes:
- Spectral Paint / Pigment layer and brush mode
- Linear blending for non-pigment layers and brush modes
- Smudge enhancements
- Layer "views": added controls for switching between different views of the documents, with the views describing which layers are visible together
- Fullscreen improvements with autohide of toolbars
- Python3 compatibility
The pigment / paint mode is now default for all brushes and new layers. In case some don't like this, or it's too slow, set the
Pigment slider off from the Tools Options Panel (can be enabled from the Edit menu), and change the layer mode to Normal."Paint Mode" is a spectral upsampled 30 channel weighted geometric mean compositing mode that emulates the appearance of paint and pigments, as seen in this image (from Brien Dieterle / GitHub):
Also, a new brush pack, called Dieterle, is available with the Linux AppImage binary (it was not included yet with the Windows binary but it can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page). The MyPaint developers recommend using this brush pack "to see many new features in action".
Download MyPaint 2.0.0 alpha
The downloads page offers Linux (AppImage) and Windows binaries. To run the AppImage on any Linux distribution, make it executable (right click it, select
Properties, then check the Allow executing file as program or similar box), and run it by simply double clicking it.For Ubuntu and Linux Mint, there is an official MyPaint PPA but it does not contain the new MyPaint 2.0.0 alpha. However, there's an unofficial PPA you can use to install MyPaint development builds (a bit older than the latest 2.0.0 alpha) on Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 or 18.10, and Linux Mint 19.* or 18.*. If you wish to use it to install MyPaint 2.0.0 dev builds from this PPA, run the commands below in a terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alex-p/mypaint
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mypaint
