6 Even Better Open Source Graphics Programs

“1. MyPaint — Paint and Draw: MyPaint is an exceptionally
user-friendly drawing and painting program, with the great bonus of
supporting pressure-sensitive drawing tablets, such as Wacom. (The
Wacom Bamboo costs less than $100 and is a great introduction to
drawing tablets.) MyPaint comes with a fabulous number of
brushes.

“Of course they’re not real brushes, but rather the colors,
patterns, shapes, textures, and widths of strokes that appear on
the screen when you draw with your mouse or drawing tablet stylus.
You get splats, smudges, snow, airbrush, glow, hair, tree, sparks,
stings, different types of pens and pencils and hundreds more. You
can even create your own custom brushes.

“MyPaint supports layers, many keyboard shortcuts, and has a
nifty Scrap feature. Scrap lets you make changes and save different
versions quickly by pressing F2. Each saved scrap is automatically
given a new name like scrap001_a.ora, scrap001_b.ora, and so
on.

“MyPaint supports a limited number of file formats: .ora, .png,
and .jpg. .ora is OpenRaster, an open layered graphics file format
with the goal of enabling interoperability between graphics
programs.

“It is still immature so don’t count on it for seamless interop;
use it as MyPaint’s native format that saves layers. .png and .jpg
are universal and can be read and edited by any graphics program,
but they do not support layers. “

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