Tux Paint is a paint program designed for children with easy to use big buttons and loads of fun features to keep children entertained for hours.
Art has always been something children enjoy doing from a young age even though you have to politely enquire 'what is it?' and proudly stick the picture of the purple cat with three legs and the giraffe length neck on the fridge door. It's a good way to encourage children to learn colours, shapes and to observe the world around them. Computer's can complement traditional pencil and paper drawing giving the child access to lots of fun features. Tuxpaint is one such paint program and worth using if you have a Raspberry Pi. It is also available on other Linux distributions so you can use it on a Linux desktop or laptop as well.
TuxPaint comes with built in art covering many subject such as Animals, Transport, Buildings, Space, Clothes, Signs, Letters, Food, Music, Objects, People, Plants, Celebrations and of course Tux the Penguin. These are all accessible through the Stamp tool.
Each stamp can be sized and flipped before stamped into place.
Choosing the Paint tool gives you access to a large range of shaped brushes to draw with from a dot through to stars, flowers, swirls and squares. Pick the colour you want to use and create a master piece. There is even a cat and squirrel that change position with each click which gives the effect that there are several running around the screen.
Drawing a nice straight line with a mouse is a challenge at the best of times so the Lines tool draws a perfectly straight line with your chosen brush shape.
Other shapes like squares, circles, and triangles can be draw with the Shapes tool. These can be drawn as solid coloured shapes or just outlines.
The Text tool allows you to add text to your masterpiece in your chosen colour, size and font.
Along with the Stamp tool children will get a lot of fun out of the Magic tool. This is a special effects menu which gives you many tools to alter your image in fun ways. Choose an effect for example Cartoon, now when you move the mouse over your drawing the edges of the coloured areas get black boarders added. Some effects add to your image such as Brick which draws wall bricks on the screen. Other additive effects include Flower, Rain, Rails and Foam. Some effects alter the image such as negative, darken, mosaic, sharpen, smudge, waves and tint. For drawing like an Octopus the Kaleidoscope option is always fun.
Once you happy with your work of art you can print or save the image. The save option adds your picture to a library stored within Tux Paint so no need for a file requester, just hit Save and it's done.
Keep up the DIY or your house will look like this too.
This is a good children's fun paint package that can be used to learn shapes colours and mouse control. The large range of Stamp shapes can be used for learning the names of different animals, objects and subjects with younger children.
Tux Paint is available as a Raspbian package so can be installed using LXterminal with the command;
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tuxpaint
For more information on installing Raspbian packages see here.