MyPaint 2.0 Open-Source Drawing and Paining App Adds Major New Features

MyPaint 2.0

If you’re looking for a no-frills drawing and painting application that works great with Wacom-like graphics tablets, MyPaint 2.0 is now available for download and it’s a massive update.

After more than a year in development, MyPaint 2.0 is finally here and it looks like it’s a major release adding many goodies for passionate digital artists. This version replaces the MyPaint 1.2 series as the latest stable release due to important changes to brush parameters and a whole new layer mode.

The developers explain that layer mode featured in this release uses a brand new compositing method, making files created with MyPaint 2.0 incompatible with earlier releases. Furthermore, the brush stroke data created in MyPaint 2.0 won’t work properly in previous versions of the software.

Here’s what’s new in MyPaint 2.0

New features in MyPaint 2.0 include linear compositing and spectral mixing (pigment mode), layer views, new brush settings including gridmap, offsets, pigment, posterize, and extra smudge settings, as well as new brush inputs including attack angle, barrel rotation, base radius, direction 360, gridmap x/y, and zoom level.

The Floodfill tool got a lot of attention too, now supporting offset, feathering and gap detection, opacity, blend mode, and source. The tool is also now cancellable and respects the Colorize, Erase, and Lock Alpha modes.

Moreover, this release makes brush strokes to be dependent on view rotation and view zoom, adds new symmetry modes like rotational, snowflake, vertical, and vertical+horizontal, and expands the flood fill functionality with new feather, gap detection, offset, and other parameters.

This release also adds the ability to simplify nodes in the Inking tool, bumps the maximum input mapping curve points to 64, implements separate H/C/Y pickers, and introduces support for importing layers. It also lets users emulate inputs with modifier keys.

Among other noteworthy changes included in MyPaint 2.0, there’s full Python3 support, initial Flatpak support, new keyboard shortcuts, new commands (Remove Layer Backdrop and Refactor Layer Group), per-document settings, as well as lots of internal changes and numerous bug fixes.

You can download MyPaint 2.0 right now from its GitHub page where the application is distributed as a universal AppImage that should work on most GNU/Linux distributions and a source tarball for OS maintainers.

Last updated 4 years ago

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