Hi again.

Following my past journal about opencanvas, I was searching for free alternatives for drawing and I found 3 for drawing and 1 for animation.

I choose this 4 because of their easy of installation and usage, and their code is quite mature so less chance that you'll get a crash.

-GIMP [link]
Most of you might know of this one because in the free software field is the oldest and most popular. In my personal opinion I didn't like it much because of its multiwindow interface and I need to do some stuff to get my table to work, but once is set up you have something like photoshop. Their about to release a new version that has all the stuff on one window, can't wait to try.

-Qaquarelle [link]
Easy to install, and use, gives you a really realistic brush stroke on the canvas, I really like who the brushes are emulated, for the water color lovers this is the right tool, it can also emulate Oil painting.

It detected tablet pressure right away and didn't have to botter with other configuration. The only thing missing are layers, but love the painting tools.

-MyPaint [link]
Easy to install like Qaquarelle, offers you an infinite canvas to paint on(no resizing), not sure if you can rotate the canvas here because I just installed and did some basic testing, I liked the painting tools here, it didn't detect my tablet out of the box but was able to use the mouse and do some strokes, I found it quite nice how it emulates pencils and stuff, nothing else to say about this one because haven't tested it much yet.

Now for animation programs:

-Pencil: [link]
Light and easy to use, you can quickly do some nice animation drafts and play them, it has a infinite canvas, you can rotate and zoom it, it support bitmap and vector graphics, and you can export your animation to flash and other formats.

Theres another free option for animation, and its called Synfig ([link]) its quite powerfull and can do really nice animation with it, the problem is that its not Windows friendly, you can have it up and running quite fast in a linux but theres no easy way to get it running on Windows, well, at least you don't have to compile it by sources, but you have to download and install several libraries before you can make it work, it's not, one installer and works out of the box.

The last time I try it, the windows version was lacking of sound support, so you needed another program to put sound in it, don't know about you, but Im one of the lazy ones, if theres a more easier option I prefer going for that like pencil thats free, or flash, on *cough cough* pirate bay.

So I hope find this info usefull and.... oh, almost forgot, for painting theres also Krite that comes with KOffice, but I really didn't bother to get one, you have to get it throw KDE installer (which didn't work for me) and since its part of KOffice, you will probably have to download the full package before you could use it. Anyway, as I was saying, hope you find this info usefull, and if you have other options (that are free) can post in the coments.

Bye