MyPaint developer Andrew Chadwick reports on January 15, 2016, that his MyPaint free, open-source and cross-platform digital painting software reached version 1.2.0 for all supported operating systems, including Linux, Mac and Windows.

MyPaint 1.2.0 has been in development for the last three years, as MyPaint 1.1.0 was announced back in January 2013, during which that developer managed to implement some interesting and attractive features and functions that promise to make this piece of software a worthy candidate to digital painters around the globe.

Prominent features of MyPaing 1.2.0 include new Flood Fill tool, a new workspace interface consisting of two sidebars and dockable tabbed panels, a new and intuitive Inking tool for drawing smooth strokes, a brand-new brush pack, support for layer groups, GTK3 support,  as well as smoother panning and scrolling.

Furthermore, the applications ships with a new color and brush history panel, improved frame-setting and symmetry-setting modes, new layer modes with multiple masking modes, a new layer trimming command in the frame options, a new dark theme (enabled by default), and good looking freehand cursors and icons.

"It’s been a long time since the last stable release, but I’m really happy to announce that MyPaint version 1.2.0 is ready. Windows binaries will be available soon, and Ubuntu packages available for testing through the usual PPA. Expect releases for other operating systems and distros in due course," said Andrew Chadwick.

New fallback layer types, better Windows support

Among other features implemented in MyPaint 1.2.0, we can mention the addition of new fallback layer types, data and non-PNG image, new vector layers that can be edited with an external application like Inkscape, and new color wheel options like Red-Green/Blue-Yellow and Red/Yellow/Blue.

There are also new display filters, including greyscale, the accelerator map editor was migrated to Preferences, more image types are now supported as backgrounds, the size of the brush is no longer changed by the Eraser mode, and buggy devices are now restricted by Device Preferences.

Last but not least, MyPaint 1.2.0 ships with an automatic backup functionality that saves all you work and prompts you to recover it during startup. Support for the Microsoft Windows operating system was improved as well, numerous bugs were fixes, and various translations have been updated.

Download MyPaint 1.2.0 for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.