The Verdict Digital art programs
We’ve decided to name Krita as our top paint package because it balances a huge number of art features with an artist-focused, attractive and configurable user interface. As well as its prestigious facilities in the realm of art creation, it also has a fair few in the area of image processing. Along with being a bitmap-based tool, it even has some fully usable vector drawing facilities.
Inkscape is, at its heart, an illustration program. You can freehand draw and paint with it, but ultimately you’re constructing the overall illustration from shapes, lines and curves. At all times, you can inspect and tweak these elements to your heart’s content. This may be handy for those without a steady, practiced hand when it comes to drawing, but many people simply prefer this way of working. It can work with bitmap images, but it’s limited when it comes to creating bitmap art. This means that there are certain types of art style that it wouldn’t be suitable for, such as pixel art or brush-based art that requires a lot of subtle control.
GIMP is one of the best known open source GNU/Linux applications. It would be doing it a disservice to call it a ‘Swiss army knife’ as that implies that it’s not a robust workhorse when carrying out day-to-day activities, which it is. However, as powerful as it is, it wasn’t designed from the ground up to be a tool for creating art from scratch. For this reason, although it has a lot of the same tools as Krita, the workflow isn’t as problemfree when used in this role.
MyPaint is aimed at people who just want to draw and paint using a computer, and it’s proved to be a surprisingly deep piece of software, if you want it to be. By adding and removing docks, it can be turned into either a fully featured art package for professionals or a simplified sketching application. It wouldn’t be our first choice as an image retouching and processing application though.
Karbon is a vector drawing package, but it doesn’t have the same depth of features as Inkscape. Some of the user interface is so sparse it makes the program feel unfinished. However, drawing in the package is a mostly pleasant experience, and it actually helps that the features are focused on that task, even though it’s less of a generally useful tool than Inkscape.