I had a chance to play with a couple of programs that have interested me for awhile. One is MyPaint and the other is Gogh. I have never gotten Gogh to run before so I was happy it actually ran. I am on Ubuntu 7.10 btw. Both are similar to Deep Paint/ Corel Painter natural paint programs on Windows and utilize the full potential of your drawing tablet.

Both programs have their strengths and weaknesses. In my opinion using MyPaint is the better of the two even without layers. Gogh has layers but lacks the cool brushes;although, you have a lot of control over the brushes. Both applications ran fast and appeared to be bug free, no strange behaviors and no crashes. Wacom worked beautifully in both!

MyPaint I actually built from source. There is an older deb for Feisty, but I wanted the latest version, which I suggest. The build went very smooth once I installed GTK 2.0 and python-gtk2-dev then I simply did the typical ./configure and a make. I tried checkinstall to build a deb but it failed so I just elected to run mypaint from the build directory.Gogh I just downloaded the latest source and ran gogh, fired right up.

MyPaint and Gimp would be a great combination for any artist with MyPaint being an alternative to Corel Painter and Gimp an alternative to Adobe Photoshop.  Maybe Gogh will advance at a later time and I will change my mind, but at this point MyPaint is the winner for a natural paint program for Linux.

Versions evaluated:

Gogh-0.1.2.1  Download

Gogh in action [1440x900] 

MyPaint-0.5.0 Download

MyPaint in action [1440x900]

Of course I never understood having two separate applications, but in the commercial world I guess it makes sense. Personally, I use Gimp or Photoshop to do my natural painting. I speed painted this and this in the Gimp using my Wacom.