iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Thanks for trying it! I agree, the straight line thing sucks - an update yesterday overhauled that particular tool and there's more options I'd like to add over time 😀 Give it a try again sometime in the future, I'm adding new stuff weekly so it might be a better fit eventually!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Ooh yes good point, the text tool is very bare-bones so I could simply add support for opening PSDs with text in. I've been working on the floating windows since your message actually and making good progress, I just need to do a bit of a rewrite of things, so likely the 1 week from now update.

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Yep, the brush engine needs a bit more work so it can handle the wetness etc simulations properly, but those will be possible and there'll be nice presets made. Android won't be for a little while, it's planned but it's lower priority than Linux,Mac,IpadOS sadly!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Each layer also has a hue blending option, if its blendtype is Normal. It will apply the same mixing to any transparent pixels on the layer with what's below. Or if you lower the opacity of the layer itself.

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Yep - I wish I could have turned it to 100% by default, but it would have confused people used to regular digital painting :D. in another world where this might be someone's first digital painting experience since learning to mix paints growing up, I think higher %'s would be the intuitive choice

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

No not yet, will be coming! the floating windows is a tricky one.. but a proper swatches palette is easier and will be added soon

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

No need - I already implemented my own hue mixing system in it!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Updated the gallery page with lots of amazing art made with @kalapaint.bsky.social so far. Been mindblowing seeing people use my own program to make such cool stuff! 😍🥰 kalapaint.app/index.php?pa...

kalapaint.app

Gallery - Kala Paint

Paintings made with Kala Paint, a one-time-purchase painting app for concept artists and illustrators.

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The warning is prob because I'm still going through "Code Signing" - where you pay MS to attach your company's name to the program. Windows doesn't like it if you haven't done this, and it's a paid & slow process(unless I pay extra). This isn't indicative of safety, just that a company published it.

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Reposted by Oliver Lawson

Sam Swain @sam.apparance.uk · 15/09/2026

Oliver is a good friend, experienced illustrator, and amazing coder too! He's only gone and built a new paint app around his super fast brush engine. "Kala Paint" is chock full of artist-first features, and growing in power, community, and interest by the day. Check out the free trial!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Nobody can confirm that someone else's .exe is safe, exercise caution with all programs imo (I'm the dev) Best i can say is - i have a lot to lose and nothing to gain by doing anything like that, and virus scanners are really good these days/packets can be monitored for any suspicious net activity

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Yes, I love pixel art and have lots of ideas for this, though it's not high priority right now so may be a little while

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Ooh that sounds bad. I've had a few people report this, and when I looked into it, it was because of OpenAI bot scrapers flooding it from the same area, so Cloudflare blocks it there. Try again in a couple of hours and it should sort itself out, otherwise do let me know.

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Yep, I'd like to do that too. AppImages are just easier to develop some things for to start with

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Thank you! Yep, mac version is in the works

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It will! after linux and mac port, so hopefully next year!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

anything to do with colour spaces or technical brush stuff that needs to be instantly understandable without jargon

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It will be eventually! Might take a little while as I need to expand the brush engine's capabilities a bit first

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

a little Kala Paint painting between coding things @kalapaint.bsky.social I added a smoothed speedup feature to the Timelapse Manager for this that everyone can now use! I used it here to make the rendering stage play 6x faster(!). A bit more fun to watch without the sketch going by in 2 frames

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Ooh, I think I know why and will fix, thanks!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Not yet! I'm the solo dev so I'm focusing on just developing it for now. There are tooltips on everything, but tutorials will have to come later

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Yep. I say functionally complete because there's still a couple of bits I haven't put in yet, but coming very soon. Let me know on the Discord if something doesn't look quite right, I'm still working on visual parity of them but it should get close already.

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Starting work on this soon! First Mac, which share most of the work needed for the iPad version.

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Yep, will start work on it soon!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This scales the entire UI. I haven't yet added more granular scaling like just Text, but will be added

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Whichever is more comfortable for you. Discord is preferable for me as i can keep track of things there/it's just open on a monitor all the time, and you might see others with the same bugs. For this one, there's a scaling options in Preference>Display!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Oh yeah definitely, they're good ideas. i'm from gamedev tooling background, it would be fun/not hard to support these, have added to my list!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

(Dev here) the main thing is gpu/perf of painterly stuff. for Gimp it's more of a focus on painterly tooling and design, which Krita does have. Secondarily, a few fun tools that neither has, and more on the way. Downsides: it's just me, it's early in development, and compared to those it's paid!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

No not yet, I've focused on painterly stuff for now and will be doing line art tooling later

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

A bit rubbish. The font dropdown is the only improvement over classic apps in being instant... but no good text tooling yet, as this program is so early in development and I've focused on painting stuff only. It's mostly in there to ensure PSD compatability. I'll work more on it though!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Linux is underway, Mac is planned but not started yet. Linux build is running, but I need a few weeks to ensure it works well on different gpus, with opentabletdriver etc

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I second this (Kala dev here). Umoupen looks incredible, and animation isn't my specialty or interest, so while there are thousands of cool painterly things for me to add, the line i'm drawing is on any animation stuff in Kala Paint (sorry!)

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

and 3: no! tldr was no,no,no, but it's early days with the program :D. I intend to get in lineart/inking tools based around vector stuff in, but it's lower prio than the linux port so will be a couple months at least. atm it's is focused on painty things, but i want it to be great for lineart too

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

but there's a lot of places in the code that need dedicated 16/32bit support before I add document/file handling of it. this is a pretty high priority, esp for everyone doing 3d render comping work, so won't be too long!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

2: technically yes but the implementation isn't finished yet and the spec isn't written to the .wip native format, so .. i guess technically no. I'll add support soon. things like liquify, filters are done in 16bit or 32bit modes where it matters to preserve quality during transformations

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Buuuut I know why you're asking, there's ofc a difference between rich blacks and k-only blacks, specifying actual inks is important for comics and so on, and it can't be simulated by conversions from RGB. i'll consider full CMYK down the road for more artists who need it, but will be a little while

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

so juggling all that + various printer profiles is not an easy win and I can see why some software don't bother at all!

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Then I make my gamut compression decisions at the end, and let a prepress tech make sure it looks good. Simulating the print stuff & an extra colour channel per pixel does also slow things down/increase sizes, & things like blendmodes/filters are all written for RGB and undefined for CMYK(s)

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Personally I like painting for print in RGB with soft proof checking, then convert at the end, because I can paint in a "true" (if less physical) colourspace with wider gamut and just concern myself with visual colour and not about ink %'s, dot gain, black point simulation, substrate...

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

not yet. 8bit RGB only for now, I'm working on colour management stuff atm, and 16/32bit RGB will be coming first and soft proofing/converting to CMYK for a while yet. on the roadmap but in backburner column.

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Your timelapses are the first thing I see in my feed and it's a beautiful thing!!

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Reposted by Oliver Lawson

Kala Paint @kalapaint.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Kala Paint is out! I'm @olawson.bsky.social , professional artist for 15 years, then game dev, now wrote the painting software I wish I'd been using all this time. GPU-run creamy brushes, no subscription, no gen AI crap, hand-coded with ideas from artists in our Discord, and more added weekly!

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Reposted by Oliver Lawson

Sabou - Sabrina Miramon @therealsabou.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Back from the Dead! My other half @olawson.bsky.social just released his painting program Kala. Made me want to paint again. It's great, it's fast, loads of features + more coming. No subscription, trial version with all the features. No AI, ever. Check it out : kalapaint.app

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Reposted by Oliver Lawson

Sam Swain @sam.apparance.uk · 07/12/2024

Behold... Apparance Town Toy! Tinker with a tiny town. Fiddle with procedural forests, towns, and skyscrapers. Free download, link below. #ScreenshotSaturday #ProcGen

Grassy landscape disappearing off into the distance with forests, towns and buildings scattered across it. A toolbar visible at the bottom with 3d buttons representing the object types you can place.

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Oliver Lawson @olawson.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I've been using Sam's software (Apparance) as an insanely powerful runtime #procgen tool for Unity/UE games for the past few years and it's insanely underrated. Some of my work is on that article, check it out!

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