As a aspiring artist I am interested in programs such as Corel Painter and RightHemisphere's Deep Paint which, along with a graphics tablet, allows me to practice without the mess and the smells! Unfortunately, I cannot find any programs that uses the 'virtual natural media' method with half the sophistication of Painter or Deep Paint.

As a Linux advocate (a Kubuntu user) I tried to find something that would satisfy my artist's urges. Although I found a couple of programs that offered a couple of features or promising projects that were left abandoned, I could not find what I needed

I have tried installing Painter and Deep Paint with Wine but with no success. I have installed ArtRage - a freeware windows program that runs very well under Wine but it does not have the full feature set that Painter offers.

Does anybody know of such a program for Linux? Or even if a program is in the early stages?

I wish there was a Linux equivalent to Paint, which is fab for realistic painting! Hopefully the Gimp will evolve into one or even better.

Here are the best editors I know of:

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12 - The Pixel image editor is one of the projects which show the power of Free Pascal Compiler: Pavel Kanzelsberger made an image editing program using FPC which works on 8 platforms.

The GIMP - Very good

If none of the above satisfy your needs then I really don't know another one comparable...