Mix Painter

Mix Painter is a painting application in which colours mix in the manner of physical pigment, so combining yellow and blue produces green rather than grey. It includes an automatic painting function that converts any imported image into editable brush strokes. These strokes are placed on a timeline in the order they were created, allowing the user to scrub backwards and forwards to see how the picture was built up.

Animation is built into the toolset: any brush, layer or effect can be animated and the result exported as video. A mirror symmetry mode repeats a single stroke radially a user-defined number of times as it is drawn. All effects are procedural, meaning blur or warp effects can be stacked on a layer and reordered at any point without altering the underlying strokes. Users can also write their own effects using a simple scripting syntax that runs on every stroke or pixel.

The remaining tools cover brushes, an eraser, smudge, shapes, pen, fill, selections, crop, straighten, layer masks and text. A free browser version of the same application is available. The Steam release is the desktop build, which does not require a browser or WebGPU setup and receives updates through Steam; purchasing it supports the project. In both versions, artwork is kept locally and does not leave the user’s computer.