I’ve been waiting for six years.
GIMP is a free image editor, usually touted as a free alternative to Photoshop but I frankly don’t care.
I’ve been using GIMP since 2005 and I’m having war flashbacks of the awful interface and frequent crashing it did before a major update during the early 2.0 era.
Time to test the new update!
I did a quick sketch to test the brushes on but unfortunately, GIMP crashed a few minutes after I started colouring. And because I was too excited to test the thing, I didn’t really save anything aside from this screenshot.
Determined to keep testing GIMP, I salvaged the sketch from this screenshot. Apologies for a low-resolution illustration. ;_;
It’s been a while since I used MyPaint brushes. I used MyPaint from 2011 to 2014 until I switched to Clip Studio Paint. My only gripe with MyPaint was the dated and buggy interface, but I didn’t like the 1.0 update either so I kept the buggy 0.9 version.
This is MyPaint’s brush engine at work.
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Only gripe for now is the saving process, it seems to significantly lag on my system regardless of the format.
In 2.8, I do feel it lags a little when it pops up the final export dialogue but this one freezes long enough to actually potentially crash the entire app. Hopefully the next minor updates will address this issue.
Anyway, here’s the final image!
The source file is available for my blog readers for download.
You can look at it or do modifications for personal use as long as you don’t claim the file as your own. Please note you need to have GIMP installed on your system.
Download .xcf (1.74Mb)
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Some extra stuff with the 2.10 update:
Originally introduced in 2013, the N-Point Deformation tool is now shipped with a public stable release of GIMP. Except, it requires a bit of under the hood tinkering to enable it as it’s still a bit buggy as the devs claim. The release notes recommend to not use this with images beyond 1500px but for my potato system, it’s already struggling at 300px!
From what I understand, this works best on transparent images then GIMP will attempt to map a frame on the entire shape on your first click. The succeeding clicks will determine where anchor joints will be positioned. Dragging the anchor joints will deform the image accordingly.
GIMP finally supports real time canvas rotation. The lack of this feature in previous versions crippled GIMP’s capability to be a competent painting tool app. If you want to rotate the canvas in previous versions, you’ll have to do a “hard rotation”.
Either you completely rotate the entire canvas in 90-degree increments and lag the entire system if you have a lot of layers, or permanently rotate specific object/layer which is destructive editing.
Anyway, I’m definitely featuring more GIMP in my time lapse drawing series in the future. I’ll just have to find a way to capture the entire thing separately without the zooms and rotations.
