Vara0.1.260926

Vara lets users create digital paintings on a Linux desktop with pressure-sensitive brushes and a deliberately uncluttered workspace. It is intended for sketching and painting rather than photo retouching, offering a smaller feature set than full-scale graphics editors. Brush dynamics include pressure-based sizing, stroke smoothing, pressure-based opacity, and changes to size or opacity based on drawing velocity.

The toolset provides Pencil, Brush, Eraser, Eyedropper, and a basic Bucket Fill, while advanced Bucket Fill, selections, and masking support more controlled work. Brush presets, a quick palette, keyboard shortcuts, zooming, panning, canvas rotation, and a buffer area help users move around a painting without adding a large editing workflow. Its internal color processing uses 32-bit High Dynamic Range data with a Linear RGB representation.

Vara opens and saves XCF files and exports PNG images, making it useful for creating paintings that can continue in compatible graphics software. Older releases used in a Snap sandbox may fail to save an export unless the filename explicitly ends in “.png”, so that extension is important when working with those versions.

Version 0.1.260926 is open-source software for users who want a focused painting program rather than an image editor such as GIMP or Photoshop or a children’s drawing application such as TuxPaint.