v1.2.0 User Manual

User Interface

When MyPaint is first opened, you’ll see a single window appear with not much in it. In the centre, there’s a plain off-white paper background where you can draw. At the top, there are toolbars and menus. At the bottom, there’s a status bar with some buttons and indicators clustered in the corners.

With a bit of customization you can set up sidebars full of dockable panels and palettes. You can make the MyPaint use the full screen area too, and tell it to hide the controls while you’re working.

For more information, see the User Interface page.

Tools

Anatomy of a stroke

When you paint a stroke, the result is defined by different parts of MyPaint. You can combine any Painting Tool, Brush and Paint Mode to suit your drawing style. MyPaint uses one and the same engine for all kinds of brushes (and the eraser).

• Painting Tool: Defines how the shape of a stroke is made
• Brush: Defines the look of the stroke
• Paint Mode: Defines how the resulting color is applied to the canvas.

The Painting Tools

The general painting tools change the input method of strokes and can be used to construct geometrical shape. The lines that are created will be made with the current brush, colour, and paint blend mode.

• [[Freehand|v1.2-Freehand-Tool]] - free drawing without constraints
• [[Inking|v1.2-Inking-Tool]] - smooth Strokes than can be modified
• Lines and Curves
• Connected Lines
• [[Ellipses and Circles|v1.2-Ellipses-and-Circles]]

Other Tools

MyPaint also offers Tools for:

• [[Navigation|v1.2-Main-Toolbar#view-main]]
• [[canvas tools|v1.2-Main-Toolbar#core-tools]]
• the colour picker.

Main Menu: Edit → Current Tool

Shortcuts for brush settings

Brush shortcut keys are used to quickly save and restore brush settings. You can paint with one hand and change brushes with the other, even in mid-stroke.

There are 10 slots available for brushes. By default, shortcuts are assigned to the keys 1 through 9, and to the 0 key. To save your current brush’s settings to one of these press Ctrl+<number>, for example Ctrl+9. To load stored settings back, just press the number key on its own.

The brush shortcuts you assign are saved to your personal MyPaint settings, allowing you to use them in future sessions.

By default, pressing the Q key saves your current brush’s settings to the most recently used shortcut slot.

Options

By default, brush shortcut keys remember the colour you had active when you saved the brush.

This behaviour can be turned off using the main menu:

• Brush → Shortcut Keys → Brush Shortcut Keys Restore Colour.

Preferences

The Preferences Window gives you options to configure MyPaint’s appearance, input, keyboard shortcuts and many other settings.

Open the Preferences Window by:

• Menu Edit -> Edit Preferences
• Menu Window -> Edit Preferences