I came to this thread (“First hour with Mypaint”) with the hope that it would be about… err… well, the first hour with Mypaint. It turns it’s about several (very interesting and useful, though) issues regarding the user interface.
Nevertheless, being a newbie to Mypaint and to this forum, I did not want to risk some sort of criticism by breaking rules and creating a thread that was not necessary, so I will post here about my “First hour with Mypaint”, if that is acceptable, that is. Please be patient with me if not.
I am very experienced in several “digital artist’s tools”, such as (in Linux): Krita, Inkscape and a bit of Gimp) and (in Windows) Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel Painter, Corel Draw, among several others.
My first impressions with Mypaint were, frankly, a bit confusing. On one side, it has many refreshingly creative ways of seeing and doing things, as well as an impressive amount of excellent and beautiful selection of brushes and other tools, including advanced features that are seen only in expensive proprietary software, and so on. So I was (and am) extremely happy to see such fantastic Open Source program, that can almost replace with advantage many proprietary tools that not necessarily have the best quality always.
On the other hand, however, I did notice immediately the lack of selection tools, and found that there was some explanation that I found somewhat unconvincing, suggesting something like it was a decision not to use selection tools because it was not necessarily mandatory to use them, or something like that nature, that really disappointed me. I would understand if I would have read: “we don’t have that yet, but plan on having it, it just will take time”. And that would have been clear and neither confusing nor disappointing.
I have read, however, a thread in this forum about “Selection Tools” and realized that is now included in the plans, which is the best news you guys could announce here, and actually should be mentioned in the Mypaint documentation, instead of suggesting that it is possible to work without selection tools, because although it is objectively working without selection tools, you will understand that every single potential user of this otherwise magnificent software, who is experienced in other traditional platforms, will absolutely think immediately “yes, possible, but a huge, unsustainable pain”.
Regardless of that issue, I must say, without any doubts, that Mypaint is a truly remarkable, impressive digital artist’s tool, that I am going to promote as much as I can with friends, because it definitely needs to increase its users universe. I also think that it would be of the highest importance, that Mypaint gets real “gurus” artists using it and promoting it. But for that to happen more frequently, the First Hour impression has yet to be improved a little bit, in my opinion an honest and open clarification on the situation of the Selection Tools feature request would be much more beneficial to that end, than to try to convince people to change their techniques so dramatically as to forgetting about selections because somehow it’s possible to live without that.
Thanks a lot for this extraordinary project. I wish all the success and I will use Mypaint a lot more, even without the Selection Tools as I know them, perhaps switching between Krita/Gimp and Mypaint, whatever, I want to benefit of all the good stuff you guys offer.
Anyone can help MyPaint improve! Volunteer contributions are how we grow.
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