Plan Paint

The first mark

Open a picture or start with the blank canvas. Choose Pencil for a precise one-pixel stroke or Brushes for a wider mark, pick a color from the ribbon and drag across the paper. A line or shape is click, move, click. Drag an image into the window and it arrives as a movable selection. Everything happens on your own computer, with no account and no network connection.

F1 opens a handbook beside the picture, covering first marks, colors, curves, paths, selections, stamps, text, Atlas, saving and the keyboard. Unfinished artwork is kept every 60 seconds, and File → Recover unfinished artwork brings it back.

Give a region a gradient

The Fill bucket’s Use gradient opens linear fills at any angle and circular fills from the region’s center. Click the strip to add a handle, drag it into place, and give each stop its own color and transparency, from two stops for a soft transition to 32 for a tight metallic highlight. Twelve presets run from Rainbow spectrum and Sunset fire to Gunmetal, Rose quartz and Copper. A gradient fills a connected region, a selection or a guide, and undoes in one step. The gradient guide covers every control.

Let the gears draw

Path → Spirograph sets a translucent green support and a blue insert over the canvas: rings, shaped frames, straight racks, circular gears and rounded shapes. Drag pegs into the insert’s holes, fill each with Primary or Alt ink, and give each peg its own brush, whether gel pen, watercolor, crayon or oil. Then drag the center grip and every peg draws at once, with its own mark. The Spirograph guide lists every part and peg medium.

A few colors, many marks

Selection → Dither / posterize reduces a picture to between 2 and 32 colors. The palette is refined in OKLab to keep the picture’s tonal structure, and the dithering is fitted to how those colors mix, so it avoids harsh bright or unrelated specks. Crosswind carries forward only the color error the palette can represent, which keeps fringes and ripples from building up; Weave, Scrambled and Drift each leave their own pattern. The Dithering brush works by hand, scattering pixels halfway toward nearby colors. The dithering guide covers both.

A whole sheet, one frame at a time

Atlas divides a sprite sheet into rows and columns and steps through it frame by frame, with undo across frames. Warp edges wraps painting across a frame’s edges, another frame can sit underneath as a half-opacity reference, and ICO and CUR files open as their full sets of sizes with editable cursor hotspots.

Rotation, resizing, transformed stamps and mesh reshape all read from a continuous CONV field compiled from the original pixels, and a committed transform integrates the area of every destination pixel. A turned or stretched picture is read from one continuous image, without the ringing that linear resampling kernels leave at sharp edges.

A workspace in your language

Plan Paint follows the operating system’s language, in any of 22 language packs, and the in-app guide is translated too. Bundled fonts carry Arabic, Hebrew, Indic scripts and CJK text. Help! English! beside Help returns to English after a restart. Settings → Canvas controls adds drawing coordinates, pixel steps and separate Start stroke and Finish stroke buttons, with checkboxes in place of held modifier keys, all exposed to the operating system’s accessibility services. The language and accessibility guides have the details.