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This is the home page of The GIMPressionist, a plug-in for the excellent image manipulation program, the Gimp!

(NEW: Didn't your painting look good? Wanna burn it? Click here to roast it to pieces! ;-)

Introduction

The GIMPressionist is a plug-in for Gimp for creating natural looking paintings and similar. Blah blah blah... Look at the screenshots (and the logo at the top of this page), and you'll know what I'm talking about... :-)

News (or latest History, rather)

February 7. 2001 Whew, long time. Finally, the new stable release of GIMP has hit the streets, and I'm happy to say that the GIMPressionist is part of the package. So run, don't walk, to http://www.gimp.org/, and pick up your copy today! August 26. 1999 As of right now, the GIMPressionist can also be found in the GIMP CVS tree, and will be maintained there primarily. However, I will do the occational release here, as well, for those of you who don't live on the bleeding edge. :-) August 23. 1999 Yup, new version time, 0.99.5 is out. Only minor fixes and additions this time. Most notably would be the new Shadow controls. Have a look at the CHANGELOG for details. More interesting, I've had a little discussion with Sven Neumann (of the core GIMP team), and it seems that the GIMPressionist will be included in the upcoming GIMP 1.2 release. Yay! :-) This means that I will need all the bugreports you can throw at me. If there are none, this will be the 1.0 release. August 9. 1999 Dangit! I forgot to fix some issues with config.h before releasing it. This is fixed in 0.99.4b, available below. The new features introduced a couple of bugs, so I'll try another pre-1.0 release, 0.99.4. The Preset-description stuff isn't all good, but it works, sort of. Hopefully the portability has been improved as well, as it includes fixes for compilation on both Win32 and OS/2. :) July 29. 1999 Ooops! I recently discovered that a few files were missing from the tarballs. There are now in place. Sorry for the inconvenience. Also, here is a small page on how to simulate Cryptiq with the new GIMPressionist. July 28. 1999 OK, folks, the latest release, v0.99.3, is now out. A few powerful new features; most notably colored brushes (sort of), shadows and variable-size brushes - see CHANGELOG. (These features actually gives the GIMPressionist a superset of the possibilities Cryptiq had, and the Cryptiq is therefore officially dead as a separate plug-in.) This is definately the last beta before 1.0, so please test it hard. :-) Old news

Warning!

The GIMPressionist is still beta, so don't count on that you'll get it to compile out of the box. Personally, I have only tried it on my computer at home and at my office yet - both Linux Slackware boxes (more or less). Please drop me an Email if you have any problems, and/or know how to fix them. (Reportedly it has been successfully compiled and run on IRIX and Solaris as well, and I recently got positive feedback from people who has ported it to both Win32 and OS/2.)

Also, for the Gimpressionist to works you'll need a brush- and paperset. Currently only a few files are included. More will be included in the upcoming releases. (If you have a license for Micro$oft's Impressionist, you can easily convert both brushes and textures from that... I did. Yes, I do have a license!)

• The Gimp - works with version 0.99.23 and later, haven't tried any older versions...
• GTK - A widget set for X. Also required for the Gimp to work. (Works with 0.99.9 and 1.0.x, and 1.2.x seems to work nicely, too.)
  (With some minor tweaking it's also possible to compile it with GTK 1.1.x and GIMP 1.1.x. Working on it!)
• A decent processor and lots of RAM. The GIMPressionist is pretty CPU intensive. (It works quite well on a P100, 32M)

Things I'd like to get done before going v1.0:
• Use automake/autoconf! (I could use some tips on this one. Anyone? :-)
• Add comment and author fields to the Presets (partially done)
• Multithreading, as I just got myself a dual 350. :)

  Some of the things I hope I'll get around to do sometime:

• Some beautification of the dialogs. (A complete redesign is more like it, maybe with Glade?)
• Add support for being called from another plug-in / script.
• Handle multiple file-formats for brushes etc.
• Make an online brush / paper registry?
• Brush-families / -categories.
• Animations?

Screenshots

This is a graphics intensive page, so if you think you can handle it, click here! It's a little out-of-date now, but I'll shoot some newer soon.

The whole package:

• gimpressionist-0.99.5.tar.gz - the source with some papers and brushes (approx. 508 KB)

  Or just parts of it:
  

• gimpressionist-0.99.5-basic.tar.gz - the source with (almost) no papers or brushes (approx. 80 KB)
• gimpressionist-0.99.5-data.tar.gz - data files only, no plugin (approx. 448 KB)

  Extras:
  

• gimpressionist-0.99.3-extra.tar.gz - A set of contributed Brushes and Papers. Recommended! (approx. 887 KB)
  (Contributors; Martin Weber, Noah Davis)

I'd love to hear your bug-reports, comments - both positive and negative, as well as ideas for new features, etc. I can be reached at vidar@prosalg.no.