Painting tools

Vara – minimalist digital painting tool

Vara is a drawing and digital painting application with pressure-sensitive brushes.

Vara aims to support non-artificial works, while still supporting a digital workflow. This is why many features like the shape tools, copy-paste, cloning and filters are avoided. If you need such features, there are applications like GIMP.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

  • User interface – brush presets, quick palette, and keyboard shortcuts.
  • Undo/redo support, clear layer.
  • Tools – pencil, brush, erase, eyedropper (colour picker), and a basic bucket fill.
  • Dynamics – pressure-for-size, and stroke smoothing.
  • Foreground and background layers.
  • Layer visibility – 100%, 50% and 0% for foreground, on/off for background.
  • Viewport – zoom with buttons, zoom by scrolling, navigation with scrollbars, quick buttons for 100% zoom and centering.
  • Export image or layer to PNG.
  • Scratchpad mode – turns the current document into a sandbox, letting you experiment with brushes and colours directly on the main canvas without making permanent changes. When the mode is exit, all changes are automatically undone.
  • Cross-platform support – runs under Linux and Windows.

Website: nandakumar.co.in/software/vara
Support:
Developer: Nandakumar Edamana
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Vara in action
Click image for full size

Vara is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.


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