Is there a painting simulator for Mac or Linux?

A Mac and Linux painting simulator does exist. Easel by Zaweba, a natural-media painting studio where watercolours flow and bloom, oils stay wet and pencils catch the paper grain, has a Mac and Linux version alongside the Windows one. It uses Electron around the same studio page, so the paint, surfaces and tools are the same ones Windows users get.

That shared studio page is the important bit. Easel's painting engine runs on the graphics card in WebGL2, inside a web page, rather than being tied to Windows. The Windows version wraps that page in one kind of window, and the Mac and Linux version wraps it in Electron, a well-known framework for desktop apps. Same page, same painting.

What a painting simulator actually does

A painting simulator tries to make digital paint behave like the real thing, rather than like flat colour. In Easel every picture starts on a real surface with its own tooth, absorbency, colour and texture. Watercolour flows, blooms, granulates on rough paper and lifts with a clean damp brush. Gouache re-wets, acrylic dries fast and oil stays wet for impasto. Spray and thin paint run and drip when you tilt the canvas.

Colour mixes like pigment, using Kubelka-Munk maths on the graphics card, so blue and yellow make green instead of grey. You squeeze paint onto a physical palette, mix it with a knife and load your brush, and brushes run dry and get dirty. There are 37 surfaces, from watercolour papers and canvas to brick, glass and wet plaster for fresco.

Why the same engine matters

Because the studio is the same on every system, a picture you paint on one should behave the same on another. Saved .zeasel files keep wet paint wet, along with the palette, masks and time-lapse, so a painting started on one machine can carry on later in Easel wherever you open it.

It also means the tools you learn are the same everywhere. Brushes, pencils, pastels, pens, mediums, masking tape and stencils, the mirror, values and squint views, the tracing sheet and the drawing guides all live in the studio page.

Hardware to think about

Easel paints on your graphics card, so a decent one helps. On Windows it asks for the high-performance chip, and if frames come late, wet paint moves a little slower instead of your strokes lagging. Big canvases also need plenty of memory: an A3 sheet at 300 DPI uses about 1 GB. Those are features of the engine, so the same thinking applies whichever system you paint on.

What you can do with your pictures

Paintings export as PNG, JPEG or TIFF at 1x or 2x, with or without the impasto lighting. Easel keeps a frame after every stroke, so you can export the session as a time-lapse WebM video or a web page. Some extras depend on other Zaweba programs. Edit in Paint by Zaweba hands a PNG over to Zaweba's image editor, and the time-lapse screensaver goes through Screensavers by Zaweba, a Windows screensaver. Plain exports are the simplest way to share your work from any system, since PNG, JPEG and TIFF open almost anywhere.

Finding the right download

The Easel page on zaweba.com lists what is available to download. Easel by Zaweba is free software under the EULA, works offline and needs no account, on every system it runs on.

If you have been looking for a painting simulator that treats paint as paint rather than as pixels, and you don't use Windows, Easel by Zaweba was built with you in mind too.