MyPaint and Gogh Linux natural paint applications

Last December I played around with Gogh and MyPaint, you can read that here if you like. There are screen shots there also. Both programs are natural paint programs for Linux that take advantage of drawing tablets using pressure to simulate real world medium. I really liked MyPaint at the time, but I wanted to take another look at them both since it's been a year.

MyPaint now has a version compiled for Windows, but seems to have not changed much in it's features. Gogh seems to be stagnant. I still like the brushes in MyPaint and the overall program better than Gogh. In all honesty I can get similar effects in Gimp and have speed painted a couple of things in Gimp before ever finding these programs so give that a try as Gimp really has a lot of nice features, including tablet support and layers. Here is one that I painted in The Gimp on Kubuntu using a Wacom Graphire II as an example of what can be achieved:

I originally built MyPaint on Ubuntu and the link to my older post gives details, library names, etc., but there is now a deb package so it isn't necessary. There isn't one for Mandriva 2009 though so I built it.

If you want to try the rpm there is one here created for Fedora, it might work on Mandriva. Building MyPaint on Mandriva 2009 is very straight forward - this should work on any distro...

Make sure you have the following installed. If not install the following in software management.

gtk+2.0

libgtk+2.0_2-devel

pygtk2.0-devel

Download the source from MyPaint web-site and extract to your home drive; i.e. /home/*username*/mypaint-*version*

Open the terminal and cd, change directory "cd mypaint-*version*"

Now simply type:

./configure && make && ./mypaint

./configure && make will compile the program and && ./mypaint will run it once it's compiled. You can fire it up from the terminal with ./mypaint any time after

Or you can also have make install the program for you:

./configure && make install

Hope this helps anyone interested in natural painting who is new to Linux.