This is the Flowpaint development site. For downloads, screenshots, and news updates go to flowpaint.org

About FlowPaint

FlowPaint intends to be an intuitive and powerful cross-platform next generation paint program.

It is currently at an early stage of development, with basic brush rendering working and a rudimentary user interface.

What is planned for the final version:

• A user friendly on-screen docked UI, giving easy access to often and recently used tools, settings and pictures, with a possibility to toggle to full screen mode when needed.
• Possibility to create own brushes from textures or procedural functions, and control them using pen-pressure or on-screen sliders.
• An infinite canvas, with easy navigation and the possibility to rescale a picture to any resolution.
• Wrapping canvas mode for creating seamlessly tiling textures.
• Integrated downloading and sharing of brushes and other settings online, with a built in rating and tagging system to enable you to quickly find the right tool for a job.

See the ReleaseBacklog for a full list of feature candidates.

Vision

Goals and some of the major features of FlowPaint will be:

Ease of use

Allow the user to immerse herself in a state of flow and concentrate on the drawing or painting, and not on window or image management.

• Infinite canvas, with easy zoom and pan functionality.
• A sketchbook metaphor instead of a canvas metaphor - creating a new image should only take one click.
• A single-window application with fullscreen capability and docked toolbars eliminates most window management overhead.

Power

Make it easy to define custom brushes that speed up the workflow and otherwise repetitive or time consuming drawing tasks.

• Support both picture brushes that paste custom pictures along the brush path, as well as texture brushes that color the brush stroke using custom stroke textures.
• Implement different filters for the brush path, from squiggles to branching side paths.
• Allow fast and easy configuration of brush properties from on-screen sliders, or allow them to be bound to inputs such as brush pressure or velocity or stroke length.

Cross platform

Usable in Linux, Windows, (and OSX when/if JPen supports it,) on both multi-head workstations and tablet pc:s without keyboards.

• Implemented in Java and Scala, uses the JPen library for graphics tablet input.

Content

A possibility to set up content repositories for custom brushes and clip-art using a separate webservice. A default content repository will exist, but users are free to set up own.

• Include a ranking, review, and categorization system for content (with the user interface for it in the paint program itself)
• Repositories can also contain links to other repositories, (with reviews and ranking of them)
• Users can import the repositories they want by selecting them from a list of known repositories, or entering the url directly
• Users can upload their creations to repositories that allow it.

Rapid Development

Focus on the 20% of the features that are used by 80% of the potential users

• This means that the initial focus will be on good customizable brush tools, and basic layers. Other things will be added only if they seem to be providing enough value.
• FlowPaint is a drawing and painting program, and will not be designed for photo editing (in fact, it's native file format will be vector based).
• Rapid development is subject to the available free time of the developers, amount of contributors, and the generous donations of the users. ;-)

If you want to compile the sources refer to the BuildInstructions.

The name of FlowPaint comes from 'flow', as in the psycological state of flow where one is fully immersed in a task.