Summer of Code 2012

It's that time of the year again... Even though it's a pretty cold april in Deventer, the Netherlands, we're feeling warm glow of another impending Google Summer of Code. This year four student spread over three separate and distinct continents will be cutting their teeth on Krita. Last year, Krita was one of the first projects to actually release the work of a student when we published a snapshot of what would become 2.4 half-way the summer. This year, our 2.5 release is planned for June -- so who knows what will happen?

But first let me introduce the students and their projects. There's a nice variety in experimental and directly useful

Color Managed Printing for Krita

Joe Simon, who has also worked on the Kolormanager color management kcm for KDE, will work on implementing proper color managed printing in Krita. Krita right now basically has no printing support to speak of, so this is a challenging enough task! This project happens under the umbrella of the OpenICC project.

Perspective Drawing in Krita

Shivaraman Ayjer is perhaps even more ambitious. Krita already has drawing assistants, objects you place on the canvas and that are used by the brush system to guide your lines. That makes it easy to draw lines, ellipses and so on that look freehand but are accurate. A more advanced assistant is the perspective assistant which allows you to draw lines towards a vanishing point with for instance opacity, size of saturation decreasing the closer you get to the horizon.

Shivaraman will add a mode where simple meshes from Blender can be imported, positioned and then used to draw in perspective.

Infinite Canvas/Wraparound Canvas for Textures

Shrikrishna Hollais tackling two related wishes that users have been asking for for a long time: an infinite canvas mode where you can pan the image any which way and can always continue drawing. This mode is great when sketching. Then there is the opposite: a mode where the canvas can be panned but the edges wrap around. This is ideal for creating patterns and textures.

Sandpainting Brush

Francisco Fernandesis has the most experimental project of the four: he will work on a new particle-based brush engine that will give a feel like you're painting with a stream of sand, and the sand will be re-arrangable, like ordinary color can be blurred, with his engine the particles can be moved along and mixed.