MyPaint is an open source illustration program designed for use with a tablet that is an excellent alternative for beginner digital artists.
Photoshop and Corel Painter are the tools of choice for professional digital illustrators. Paint Tool Sai has also emerged as an excellent low cost alternative, particularly for anime and manga drawing. These programs are somewhat complex, though, and still carry a cost which may put them out of reach of casual artists. Beginners looking for a simple and completely free drawing program will not find a better choice than MyPaint.
GIMP has long been considered the gold standard for free alternatives to Photoshop, but it is not specifically designed for use with a graphics tablet. It is also a multi-purpose program, with many complex options and filters for modifying photographs that can be very daunting to a first time user.
Other free programs such as Krita tend to be unstable, or are not available on Windows.
The major distinguishing feature of MyPaint is that it is a completely stripped down program. It has no options for raster scaling or transformation, no filters, and no text tools. Its options are limited to an array of brushes and blenders, a layer dialog, and a color dialog.
The huge advantage of this is that MyPaint is instantly accessible to an artist with no prior experience of digital illustration. It loads quickly and presents a default white canvas for use immediately. The brushes are varied and the tablet pressure is responsive. MyPaint uses a number of keyboard shortcuts to speed up work; R selects a color on the canvas, E swaps between the brush and an eraser version of the same, and Z and Y are Undo and Redo. Tablet pens with a button click can be used to swap between the last five selected colors.
MyPaint is also available for Linux. This is especially important because there are few truly solid options for aspiring artists who run a Linux distribution as their OS of choice apart from the GIMP, and that has developed some issues.
The program sacrifices a lot of functionality for the sake of accessibility. Many basic tools, such as the Bucket Fill, will be sorely missed by an artist used to Photoshop or GIMP who will find themselves having to color an area manually. More advanced tools such as Liquify have no equivalent at all, meaning a drawing cannot be morphed or tweaked after completion without exporting it from MyPaint and opening it in another graphics program.
Overall, MyPaint does one thing exceedingly well to the absolute exclusion of all others: raw illustration. Digital artists should certainly consider it if they require a fast sketching program, as it's far less resource-intensive than Photoshop and other fully featured graphics tools. Linux artists should consider it a staple of their desktop environment; there are few truly comparable programs available to them. As it's free, beginner artists should use it as a means to get to grips with digital illustration using a graphics tablet in place of paper and pencil, before moving up to more complex graphical editors.
