Artrage on Linux
I’ve blogged about the Wacom with excitement and the about the ‘joys’ of getting it running on Linux too. While the tablet is useful in GIMP & Inkscape (still have to try the sculpt mode in Blender), there seems to be a general lack of sketching apps on Linux which is where the device shines. There’s Krita and … that’s about it.
Since the first thing I did was hook it up on my macbook, garrett suggested I try Artrage. A great sketch & paint app that costs a fraction of the Corel Painter or Autodesk Sketchbook. It is just multiple levels better when the pencil behaves like a real pencil on a real paper, rather than just having GIMP’s default paintbrush tool support pressure.
Artrage under OS X
Somewhat positive news – it runs under wine and supports tablets fine (pressure, tilt…). Wine from openSUSE 10.3 works just fine. Grab the starter edition windows installer. To install the msi file, you need to pass it as a parameter to msiexec which comes with the wine package. Once installed, you also need to grab gdiplus (you may be able to grab it form MS directly, but I’m not sure if you can get past the genuine windows validation under wine. I snarfed it elsewhere). And that’s it. If you have set up your wacom properly, it will work in Artrage too.
Wine has matured considerably since I last tried, so you don’t only get a working app, it also registers its launcher into GNOME (and runs Firefox when clicking on links, yay). To have it at your fingertips, just open up the app-browser with the ‘More Applications…’ button in the main menu, query for artrage, and pick ‘Add to Favorites’ in the context menu of the tile. It’s now in your Slab.
So now obviously I regret buying it for Mac OS and wonder if I should buy it for Windows too, or stick with the crippled version. I really only use the pencils anyway…?
Update: Not liking the default wine icon for Artrage, I hacked up this non-icon which at least doesn’t look like 1990. Untar to /usr/share/icons/hicolor.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
I’d say that you bought it already, that’s good enough. Switch to OSX when you want to use the full version.
February 18th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Hi Jakub, I’m so jealous of your art skills and… yep, your tablet too.
That wouldn’t even nearly be a replacement, but have you ever tried Gogh?
http://www.goghproject.com/
Could that be a good starting point for a complete, full screen and tool-ready drawing/sketching application?
Again, what do you find lacking in the GIMP’s pressure sensitivity support? Or is it the brush’s “feel” on the paper that feels wrong?
By the way, I love the lineart for this monkey!
February 18th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Its also available as a one click install in wine-doors
February 18th, 2008 at 1:27 am
I tested artrage 2.5 again on wine-0.9.53 it crash for me, but I was able to run artrage 2.0 and I believe 2.2 with wine one or two years ago (with tablet pressure too), I will test again with wine-0.9.55.
There are direct links to the gfiplus file from Microsoft site on some sites.
Else for GNU/Linux, there is a great free/GPLed toolfor drawing with natural (but more abstract than artrage one) brush…. MyPaint:
http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~mrenold/mypaint/
I use it some times for doing some numeric sketchs:
http://popolon.org/gblog2/categorie/mypaint
February 18th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Hmm, mypaint really doesn’t look bad at all. The endless (growing) canvas is rather slick, and the pencil brush isn’t totally off either.
The app does look like a brush editor rather than a sketching app for now though. Lots of completely useless brushes, the brush editor is not exactly comprehensible and it doesn’t appear to have an eraser. I definitely use that often
Mypaint does have a big potential though.
February 18th, 2008 at 3:04 am
I was about to recommend Mypaint too. It may not look as polished as Art Rage, but it has very interesting things.
I would also add that it has a very natural “feel” when you’re drawing. I can’t really explain it but I find Mypaint to have more “natural” feedback when you’re drawing.
A native version of artrage for linux would be great, anyway (though I’d prefer a high quality open source alternative).
Art rage has a winner GUI, it’s affordable and doesn’t eat your computer resources as Painter.
February 18th, 2008 at 3:30 am
I’ve read that one of the blender guys working on Peach is using a tool called Pencil:
http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cIeG72D7UqU
February 18th, 2008 at 5:28 am
This is good news as I just purchased Bamboo from Wacom and I am trying to figure out how to port it to SuSE without infringing on anyone’s patent. I really have to use a program where I can sketch by hand not using on screen tools.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I may be wrong here, but you seem to dismiss Krita. If that’s so, I’d like to know why… Krita is a very good tool, and works fine on the Gnome desktop too even if it uses Qt as toolkit.
February 18th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
@Jimmac: the brush editor is really powerful, I made brush my self, that’s true that is not easy to understand, but you can explore avery parameters and make infinites kind of effects, every parameters have log of sub parameters that can be modified with curves.
@Steve: pencil is more for animation (really good for that), the tablet pressure is managed on linux for bitmap and vector drawing, I have some bugs with vector (like object shifted on onionskin), but the bitmap part works very well. And you can rotate canvas !
The bitmap brush effects are really limited, more limited than gimp-2.4 that allow some little effects, but is enough for speed painting. There are precompiled package for ubuntu, else Pencil it’s easy to compile. As it was first designed on MacOS, some features doesn’t work (like mov export, an ffmpeg usage should be enough on GNU/Linux).
February 18th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Nice icons! Looks like your icons skills are fantastic, you should really contribute to gnome icon theme!
February 29th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
@Jakub (and others with Wacom tablets): I recently bought ArtRage2.5 Full and installed on Linux via Wine. I noticed some bugs in airbrush tool drawing.
When I use airbrush in AR2 via Wine (it’s not happening under MS Windows) and paint with acute pen tilt, on the soft ends of painted spots there are some angular artifacts appearing.
Have anyone noticed it too?
March 14th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
ODDie, can’t tell. I figured I’ll just use the free version on Linux.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Just got my ArtRage license woohoo! and I’m already doodling.
Was looking to add a launcher anywhere… but making a link causes the application to not launch successful and adding it to the menu using the editor in kde4 doesn’t really adds/saves…. darn xD
oh well
thanks for the icon … I’ll use it soon 