mtPaint makes painting easy
Pixelized
You can create pixel art in just a few mouse clicks with the paint program mtPaint, and it can even teach your works of art how to walk.
Paint programs are not image editing programs. Instead, the software focuses on features involved in drawing. You cannot, therefore, expect that an application like mtPaint [1] will play in the same league as Gimp. A comparison with MyPaint [2] or Krita [3] would be more appropriate. Nevertheless, you will find many features of classic image editing programs in paint programs. mtPaint loads bitmap images, manages up to 1,000 layers, and allows users to adjust an image's brightness and contrast, as desired.
Whereas Krita and MyPaint tend to emulate intuitive painting, as with real pens or brushes, mtPaint's objective is different: It focuses on pixel art. This art form uses raster graphics and, in doing so, deliberately highlights the limited resolution of screens as a stylistic device. The style makes a – partly ironic – reference to the beginnings of video and computer game screen graphics and of the graphical user interfaces used on computers in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Invader, a French street artist [4], is one of the best known artists of this genre.
Mark Tyler, the developer of mtPaint, says his objective was to write a sleek, reliable, fast, but simple-to-operate program – and this is exactly how mtPaint seems from the start (Figure 1). The application's architecture is clearly arranged, and the painting features are spread over several locations. You will find the most frequently required tools in the toolbar. The program places the typical palettes, from which you can take colors, on the left edge of the screen. A quick selection tool for brushes lies above this palette strip (Figure 2).
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