Flowpaint

About

Flowpaint aims to be an intuitive and powerful next generation paint program.

This is an early beta release, so it lacks important features like layers, and has some rendering artifacts, but it can be used for light sketching and painting.

Features

This version of Flowpaint has the following major features:

• Undo (up to 8 actions by default). (New in 0.2)
• Adjustable brush colors and parameters. (New in 0.2)
• Recent brushes list. (New in 0.2)
• A procedural brush system with a set of hand-crafted brushes.
• A quick-save feature that allows uninterrupted sketching.

In addition the rendering engine was rewritten in version 0.2 to improve the speed and remove some rendering artifacts. Some minor rendering bugs remain though.

See changes.txt for a full list of implemented features and fixed bugs, and for the known open bugs.

License

Flowpaint is licensed under GNU GPL v2, see the license.txt file for details.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. The authors take no responsibility of use or misuse of this software.

Download

The latest version of Flowpaint can be downloaded from http://www.flowpaint.org

Installation

Flowpaint can be installed either with Java Web Start, or from a zipped package.

Flowpaint requires Java 1.6 or newer, you can download Java for free from http://java.com

Java Web Start

Simply click on the Web Start download button on the Flowpaint homepage (www.flowpaint.org). If you have Java Web Start installed (A normal Java installation usually includes it), then your webbrower should ask if you want to use java to open the webstart file (jnlp file). After answering yes, the Web Start package is downloaded and run. Java will ask you to accept the (self signed) certificate for Flowpaint, click Accept / Run to start Flowpaint.

Zipped Package

If Web Start didn't work, you can install Flowpaint from a zipped package.

You can find the package download link on the flowpaint homepage (www.flowpaint.org). Move the package to a suitable location (e.g. you home directory or My Documents). Unzip it, by right clicking on it and selecting 'Extract Here' (or similar - depends on you installed unzip software), or with unzip flowpaint-0.2.zip on unix systems.

It should extract a directory named flowpaint-0.2 (or similar, depending on the version).

In Windows, change to that directory and double-click flowpaint.bat. Flowpaint should start.

In unix systems and OSX, cd to the directory, and make sure flowpaint.sh is executable (chmod u+x flowpaint.sh), then run flowpaint with the command ./flowpaint.sh

Troubleshooting

If Flowpaint fails to start, or crashes, copy any error messages and email them to zzorn at iki.fi. You can also easily file a bug report yourself through the google code page if you have a GMail account or other google account at: http://code.google.com/p/flowpaint/issues/entry

The developers also hang out on #flowpaint on irc.freenode.net, you can drop in there to ask questions (although be prepared to wait a while, or leave a contact email, we are not always reading irc).

Usage

Along the right side of the screen there are buttons for selecting the current brush. Just select a brush, press and hold the left mouse button over the canvas, and move the mouse to draw. Flowpaint also works with graphics tablets (although on some systems it may not detect the pressure).

When a brush is selected, its parameters can be adjusted with the sliders in the lower part of the right hand sidebar.

When at least two strokes have been drawn with a brush, it is stored in the Recent Brushes section, making it easy to return to some earlier brush settings.

In the toolbar there are four buttons. The 'Quicksave' -button saves your current picture in a file under your current directory (it shows the path in the statusbar after the save). If you use the Web Start version, this is usually your home directory (on Windows this is under documents and settings / you name, not in My Documents). If you used the zipped distribution, the save location is usually the directory that you started the application from.

The 'Clear Picture' -button empties the whole canvas.

The 'Quicksave and Clear Picture' -button simply combines both of these - saves your existing picture, and clears the canvas, allowing you to directly start on the next one.

The Undo buttons undoes the last brushstroke or screen clear -action. It currently has a limited number of undo levels (8).

Contact info

• Home Page: http://www.flowpaint.org
• IRC Channel: #flowpaint on irc.freenode.net
• Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/flowpaint
• Lead developer: Hans Häggström (zzorn at iki.fi)