1) Introduction to MyPaint

                                              Introduction to MyPaint

MyPaint is a simple painting program, specialized in creating digital sketches. It provides a wide range of brushes like ink, charcoal, pencils, blur, smudge and many texture varieties such as cloud, smoke, grass and plant type brushes. These brushes are all customisable. This helps in creating images in different style.

MyPaint 1.0.0 Interface

The MyPaint tool interface is very simple. There are only two horizontal bars on the top of the MyPaint window. The first horizontal bar is the text based Menu bar and the one below it is the graphical Toolbar. The white space below it is the Canvas for your painting. Opening MyPaint application will automatically open a new canvas for painting.

Menu bar or tool bar or both can be viewed by selecting View > Toolbar and selecting the respective one from the list Menubar only / Toolbar only / Both.

1. Menu bar

Menu bar has the following menus

• File
• Edit
• View
• Brush
• Color
• Layers
• Scratchpad
• Help

All the submenus listed under each menu has the shortcut keys mentioned against it.

File Menu:

Let us understand the functions of the submenus.

New	If you would like to open a new canvas by replacing the previous one (the old replaced file will not be saved), click on File> New. In MyPaint, only one canvas can be opened at a time, so before you click New, ensure that you have saved the previous work.
Open	Clicking File> Open will open the respective file by importing an image onto the canvas. The image file formats that can be imported are ora, png, and jpg.
Open Recent	Clicking File> Open Recent will show a drop down list of the the recent files. By clicking the name of the file, it can be opened.
Open Last	Clicking File> Open Last will open the previous file on which you were working on.
Save	Clicking File> Save will save the painting. By default, MyPaint saves the painting in the open raster format (.ora).
Save as	Clicking File > Save as, helps to save an already saved file in a different location or with different name.

Edit Menu :

The Edit menu is used for :

• undoing the previous paint strokes made on the canvas
• redoing the undo action
• Selecting the mode of drawing like freehand drawing, lines and curves, ellipses and circles, symmetrical painting and to list the current mode

View Menu :

The View menu is used to:

• view the canvas in full screen mode,
• change toolbars options- only menubar, only toolbar or both
• zoom in on the canvas and zoom out of the canvas
• view the canvas in different modes – after rotation (clockwise or counterclockwise), mirror view. Then you can reset to normal mode using the reset option.

Brush menu :

Change brush	Allows to select a new brush from the wide range of brushes available.
Brushes window	Allows to not only choose a new brush but also edit brushes in a set (make favourite set, or change the order of brushes in the existing set or move brushes from one set to another)
Setting window	Gives advanced options to make changes to various brush parameters
Bigger, smaller, More opaque, Less opaque	Makes the brush radius bigger, smaller, more or less opaque

It also provides space for importing brushes and gives a list of shortcuts for brushes.

Colour menu :

Colors window allows you to select a colour from the 6 different tabs namely HCY wheel, HSV wheel, palette, HSV triangle, HSV cube and component sliders.

Pick color allows to pick colours using the eyedropper tool.

Color history allows to view the last five recently used colours.

Colour menu also allows to change color and adjust color.

The Graphical tool bar

The graphical toolbar lies below the menu bar as shown above. When the mouse cursor is placed on the tools, the function of that tool is displayed as pop-up. The tools from left to right performs the function as follows:

1. Start with new blank canvas
2. Open a file, replacing the current painting
3. Save to a file
4. Undo paintings
5. Redo
6. Current color
7. Current brush
8. Current settings
9. Current mode
10. Eraser mode
11. Pick a color from the screen
12. Mave layer
13. Edit frame
14. Mirror all strokes drawn around its vertical axis
15. Scroll view
16. Zoom view
17. Rotate view
18. Flip view from left to right
19. Reset zoom, rotation and mirroring and recentre the document
20. Zoom to fit the document and recenter

Canvas

The border of the canvas in MyPaint screen is not the end. You can test this by painting along the edges of the canvas (use a thick paintbrush) and then move the canvas in any direction by using the arrow keys on the keyboard. You will notice that the white canvas is visible beyond the painting. The canvas can therefore grow as you expand your painting, only the memory of your computer sets a limit.

The painting area can be moved using the middle mouse button or by using the arrow keys on the keyboard. The canvas can be zoomed in by pressing the '+' (plus) key on the keyboard and zoomed out by by pressing the '–' (minus) key. Another way of zooming is to click View on the menu bar and select Zoom in or Zoom out. (View > Zoom in/ Zoom out)

The painting can also be viewed in rotation mode and mirror mode. In rotation mode, painting can be viewed after rotating it clockwise or counterclockwise and in mirror mode , painting can be viewed as a mirror image (horizontal or vertical side). By clicking on Reset (Zoom, Rotation, Mirror) from the View menu, you can come back to the normal view.

Though these commands allows to view the canvas in different modes, they do not make any permanent changes to the painting. For example if a painting is saved after viewing it in rotation mode, the painting will reset automatically to normal view and appears without the rotation when it is opened again.