Tux Paint is a free, fun drawing program built for young children (kids over the age of 3).

It has a simple, easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who helps guide children as they use the program.

Tux Paint provides a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help your child be creative. Additional artwork ("stamps") can be downloaded and installed, providing a sticker-book functionality.

Tux Paint has been translated into over 45 languages, and a graphical configuration tool for parents and teachers is available which allows Tux Paint to be reconfigured to suit the special needs of children or the classroom environment.

Here are some key features of "Tux Paint":

Multi-Platform
· Works on Mac (Intel and PPC), Windows (Windows95 through Vista), Linux and other systems.
Simple Interface
· A number of useful drawing tools are made available. (See Drawing Tools, below.)
· The drawing canvas is a fixed size, so the user doesn't need to worry about "pixels" or "inches" when making a new picture.
· The entire program fits on a screen as small as 640×480, and can be displayed full-screen, to hide the computer's underlying "desktop" interface. (It defaults to 800×600 mode, but can run at larger sizes and in portrait or landscape mode, as well.)
· Loading and saving of images is done using thumbnails, so no knowledge of the underlying operating system's filesystem structure is needed. Even filenames are unnecessary.
Entertaining Interface
· Fun sound effects are played when tools are selected and used.
· A cartoon version of Tux, the Linux penguin, appears at the bottom to give tips, hints and information.
Drawing Tools
· Paint brush
· Various brushes available
· Parents/teachers can add more brushes
· Brushes can be animated
· Brushes can change shape depending on the direction they're drawn
· Alternate color palettes can be created and used
· Rubber stamp
· Hundreds of photographic and cartoon stamps images are available
· Parents/teachers can add more stamps and create categories
· Stamps can have descriptive text and sound samples (names, facts, etc.) and/or sound effects assigned to them
· Stamps can be resized, flipped and mirrored
· Raster bitmaps (Portable Network Graphics ("PNG")) with full-color and alpha transparency (32bpp RGBA) supported
· Vector graphics (Scalable Vector Graphics ("SVG")) supported (Coming in version 0.9.17!)
· Line tool
· Uses Paint Brush's brushes
· "Rubberband" shows where the line will be drawn as you move the mouse
· Shape tool
· Draw various filled and unfilled polygonal shapes
· Rotate shapes (this feature can be disabled for younger children)
· Text tool
· Comes with various fonts
· Bold, italic and size can be changed
· Parents/teachers can add more fonts
· Supports numerous languages (See International Character Input, below)
· "Magic" (special effects) tool
· Fill – "flood-fill" an area with a particular color
· Grass – paint realistic clumps of grass on the screen and into the distance
· Bricks – paint realistic large or small brick patterns
· Rainbow brush – draw using a brush that paints in all colors in the rainbow
· Sparkles – draw glowing yellow sparkles
· Blur – blur parts of the picture using the mouse
· Smudge – push the colors around as though smudging wet paint
· Lighten – fade the colors of parts of the picture
· Darken – darken the colors of parts of the picture
· Chalk – make parts of the picture look like a chalk drawing
· Blocks – turn parts of the picture "blocky"
· Negative – invert the colors of parts of the picture
· Tint – change the color of parts of the picture
· Drip – make parts of the picture look like it's dripping away
· Cartoon – make parts of the picture look like a cartoon
· Mirror – flip the image horizontally
· Flip – flip the image vertically
· Eraser
· Undo
· Multiple levels of undo
· Undo actions can themselves be undone with the "Redo" button
Commands
· Save
· Save a picture to the virtual "picturebook"
· One-click save: No file browser dialogs or filename prompts are used
· If saving an opened picture, choose to save over it (like "Save" in desktop programs), or save a new picture (like "Save As")
· Open
· Open a previous drawing by selecting its thumbnail in a virtual "picturebook"
· Delete previously-saved pictures
· Slides
· View a slideshow of multiple saved drawings
· Control the speed of playback; create class presentations or simple looping animations
· Go forward or back using the arrow keys or mouse
· Starts
· Various coloring-book-style images included
· Photographic scenes included, with foreground and background elements that you draw in between
· Print
· Print pictures on a printer
International Character Input
· Enter text in different languages using the Text tool:
· Latin languages - Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc.
· Japanese - Romanized Hiragana and Romanized Katakana
· Korean - Hangul Bul-2
· Parental and Teacher Controls
· Run Tux Paint in full-screen mode, or have it "grab" the mouse pointer, to prevent children from accidentally accessing other programs or files on the desktop.
· Sound effects can be disabled.
· The Print and Quit options can be disabled.
· Alternatively, the Print option can be limited to allow only one print every n minutes.
· Tux Paint cannot be launched more than once every 30 seconds, to prevent multiple copies from being run accidentally, due to over-eager mouse clicking.
· The directory/folder where Tux Paint saves files may be changed. This can be used to save pictures in a student's home directory on a network drive or shared drive, rather than locally on one particular workstation.
· Stamps, starters and brushes are stored using popular open formats (PNG, SVG, Ogg Vorbis, etc.) allowing parents and teachers to create their own content for use at home or in the classroom - even using completely free tools.
· The "Tux Paint Config." program allows parents, teachers, and school technicians to alter Tux Paint's behaviour using a simple, easy-to-use graphical interface. (It's separate from Tux Paint, to prevent children from changing things.)