Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.
Kids are presented with a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help them be creative.
Features
- A number of useful drawing tools are made available.
- The drawing canvas is a fixed size, so the user doesn't need to worry about 'pixels' or 'inches' when making a new picture.
- The entire program fits on a screen as small as 640x480, and can be displayed full-screen, to hide the computer's underlying 'desktop' interface. (It defaults to 800x600 mode, but can run at larger sizes and in portrait or landscape mode, as well.)
- Loading and saving of images is done using thumbnails, so no knowledge of the underlying operating system's filesystem structure is needed. Even filenames are unnecessary.
- Fun sound effects are played when tools are selected and used.
- A cartoon version of Tux, the Linux penguin, appears at the bottom to give tips, hints and information.
- Various brushes available
- Parents/teachers can add more brushes
- Brushes can be animated
- Brushes can change shape depending on the direction they're drawn
- Alternate color palettes can be created and used
- Hundreds of photographic and cartoon stamps images are available
- Parents/teachers can add more stamps and create categories
- Stamps can have descriptive text and sound samples (names, facts, etc.) and/or sound effects assigned to them
- Stamps can be resized, flipped and mirrored
- Raster bitmaps (Portable Network Graphics ("PNG")) with full-color and alpha transparency (32bpp RGBA) supported
- Vector graphics (Scalable Vector Graphics ("SVG")) supported
- Line tool
- Shape tool
- Text and Label tools
- 'Magic' (special effects) tool
- Eraser