The range of painting tools
What features does the application have and what tasks can it handle?
Although Krita is well known as an artist’s choice, it and GIMP aren’t as far apart as you might think when used for art. GIMP features the essential tools such as paintbrush, pencil, airbrush and ink tools, along with the expected plain, gradient and texture fills.
In addition to the expected bitmap-based drawing features, Krita also has vector drawing facilities, and although it wouldn’t be a match for a dedicated vector drawing program like Inkscape, in that department the features are surprisingly extensive. GIMP also has some vector drawing facilities, which are welcome, but they’re not quite on the same level as those of Krita.
MyPaint has a nice feature in the form of the scratchpad docker. This gives a small canvas in the dock area that can be sketched on or used to mix colours using the paint tools. A similar feature is promised for Krita, but it’s not in the stable release yet. A feature that MyPaint does lack is proper handling of reference images, useful for copying from an existing image or tracing over it. Both are common techniques when learning to draw.
When it comes to painting, another feature we liked about MyPaint was the infinite canvas. In other words, you can zoom out and pan around an image, and the software automatically extends the bounds of the canvas as you go. It’s a fiddly job to manually add extra space to the canvas in GIMP or Krita when you need it.
MyPaint’s user interface is a friendly one, but as we got further into exploring it and switching features on, we discovered that it’s well-equipped when it comes to pure painting and drawing features. This fits in with our overall experience of testing MyPaint: a streamlined workflow for those who just want to use it to draw and paint, with advanced features at the ready if they’re needed.
As with all areas of its operation, the drawing features of Inkscape tend towards the technical side. For example, you can get down to the exact details of editing a curve, but it’s a bit fiddly if you just wanted to doodle something. Fellow vector art package Karbon is a simpler program, but it covers the basics and it’s easier to get started with than Inkscape.