Tux Paint

Tux Paint is a fun and easy to use drawing program for young children Tux Paint is a free, fun drawing program built for young children (kids over the age of 3).

It has a simple, easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who helps guide children as they use the program.

Tux Paint provides a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help your child be creative. Additional artwork ("stamps") can be downloaded and installed, providing a sticker-book functionality.

Tux Paint has been translated into over 45 languages, and a graphical configuration tool for parents and teachers is available which allows Tux Paint to be reconfigured to suit the special needs of children or the classroom environment.

Here are some key features of "Tux Paint":
Multi-Platform

Works on Mac (Intel and PPC), Windows (Windows95 through Vista), Linux and other systems.
Simple Interface

A number of useful drawing tools are made available. (See Drawing Tools, below.)

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 640 480, and can be displayed full-screen, to hide the computer's underlying "desktop" interface. (It defaults to 800 600 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.
Entertaining Interface

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.
Drawing Tools

Paint brush

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

Rubber stamp

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 (Coming in version 0.9.17!)

Line tool

Uses Paint Brush's brushes

"Rubberband" shows where the line will be drawn as you move the mouse

Shape tool

Draw various filled and unfilled polygonal shapes

Rotate shapes (this feature can be disabled for younger children)

Text tool

Comes with various fonts

Bold, italic and size can be changed

Parents/teachers can add more fonts

Supports numerous languages (See International Character Input, below)

"Magic" (special effects) tool

Fill "flood-fill" an area with a particular color

Grass paint realistic clumps of grass on the screen and into the distance

Bricks paint realistic large or small brick patterns

Rainbow brush draw using a brush that paints in all colors in the rainbow

Sparkles draw glowing yellow sparkles

Blur blur parts of the picture using the mouse

Smudge push the colors around as though smudging wet paint

Lighten fade the colors of parts of the picture

Darken darken the colors of parts of the picture

Chalk make parts of the picture look like a chalk drawing

Blocks turn parts of the picture "blocky"

Negative invert the colors of parts of the picture

Tint change the color of parts of the picture

Drip make parts of the picture look like it's dripping away

Cartoon make parts of the picture look like a cartoon

Mirror flip the image horizontally

Flip flip the image vertically

Eraser

Undo

Multiple levels of undo

Undo actions can themselves be undone with the "Redo" button
Commands

Save

Save a picture to the virtual "picturebook"

One-click save: No file browser dialogs or filename prompts are used

If saving an opened picture, choose to save over it (like "Save" in desktop programs), or save a new picture (like "Save As")

Open

Open a previous drawing by selecting its thumbnail in a virtual "picturebook"

Delete previously-saved pictures

Slides

View a slideshow of multiple saved drawings

Control the speed of playback; create class presentations or simple looping animations

Go forward or back using the arrow keys or mouse

Starts

Various coloring-book-style images included

Photographic scenes included, with foreground and background elements that you draw in between

Print

Print pictures on a printer
International Character Input

Enter text in different languages using the Text tool:

Latin languages Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc.

Japanese Romanized Hiragana and Romanized Katakana

Korean Hangul Bul-2

Parental and Teacher Controls

Run Tux Paint in full-screen mode, or have it "grab" the mouse pointer, to prevent children from accidentally accessing other programs or files on the desktop.

Sound effects can be disabled.

The Print and Quit options can be disabled.

Alternatively, the Print option can be limited to allow only one print every n minutes.

Tux Paint cannot be launched more than once every 30 seconds, to prevent multiple copies from being run accidentally, due to over-eager mouse clicking.

The directory/folder where Tux Paint saves files may be changed. This can be used to save pictures in a student's home directory on a network drive or shared drive, rather than locally on one particular workstation.

Stamps, starters and brushes are stored using popular open formats (PNG, SVG, Ogg Vorbis, etc.) allowing parents and teachers to create their own content for use at home or in the classroom even using completely free tools.

The "Tux Paint Config." program allows parents, teachers, and school technicians to alter Tux Paint's behaviour using a simple, easy-to-use graphical interface. (It's separate from Tux Paint, to prevent children from changing things.)