Open-source Sketchbook alternatives

Krita is a free and open-source cross-platform application for creating digital art from scratch. It is a digital painting program meant for artists who want to produce professional work from start to finish, and it is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters, and the digital VFX industry.

It is built on the KDE and Qt frameworks. The GitHub repository is only a mirror, since the real code lives on KDE's invent.kde.org. The project offers a user manual at docs.krita.org, API documentation, a bug tracker, a community forum at krita-artists.org and an IRC channel where most developers can be found. Nightly builds for both unstable and stable branches are available from KDE's CI server.

Krita is written in C++ and licensed under GPL-3.0. The README includes a repository status table with feature and string freeze information for the current branch, and developer builds for Linux with debug symbols can be fetched from the CI system.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a free and open-source image editor developed within the GNOME project. This GitHub repository is a read-only mirror of the official source hosted on GNOME's GitLab, where development, releases and issue tracking take place.

GIMP is widely known as a general-purpose raster graphics editor used for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring, and it can be extended with plug-ins and scripts. The input available for this entry was limited to the project metadata, which shows the code is written in C and released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. For downloads and documentation, use the official project resources rather than this mirror.

Paint Board is a web-based creative canvas with a focus on expressive brushes. It runs in the browser, supports several interface languages and can also be built into a Docker image and served locally, so you can host your own copy.

Free drawing offers 12 brush styles, including rainbow, pixel, text, mesh, wave and thorn brushes, alongside shape drawing with built-in shapes and Lucide icons, configurable line width, line style, fill color and fill style. Other modes cover a line eraser, selection by click or box with drag, scale and rotate handles, and a canvas mode for background and custom size. An action bar provides undo, redo, copy, delete, text, image upload, clearing and saving as an image.

Several canvases can be kept as separate files with titles, ordering, and upload and download. The interface is available in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, and the project recommends a recent version of Chrome. It is written in TypeScript and licensed under MIT.