FireAlpaca

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What is FireAlpaca?

FireAlpaca (firealpaca.com) is a free desktop application for making digital art, specially used for drawing digital manga and webtoons. FireAlpaca is made with Qt and as such is cross-platform, being available for both Windows and Linux.

FireAlpaca is the same base application as MediBang Paint.

A screenshot of FireAlpaca.
A screenshot of FireAlpaca, from its official website. The UI is in Japanese in this screenshot, but it's available in English as well. On the top-right corner of the canvas we see FireAlpaca's and Pixiv's logos. This isn't a watermark, those are buttons to upload to those websites. It's possible to remove them in the application settings. In their official Youtube channel, they have posted how this drawing was made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLGuQlHaxrU.

Notable Features

Pressure Support: FireAlpaca is a drawing application for digital artists, and as such supports stylus pen pressure.

Stabilizer: FireAlpaca has a global stroke stabilizer setting.

Animation Support: FireAlpaca can do simple animations by treating layers or groups of layers as frames.

1-bit and 8-bit layers: FireAlpaca supports creating layers that have only one single color, with 8-bit alpha transparency or 1-bit alpha. This is the same feature that exists in Clip Studio Paint.

Symmetry: FireAlpaca basic symmetry support. It's not possible to move the symmetry line from the middle of the drawing, but it's there.

Reference Panel: FireAlpaca has a small window where you can paste an image to use as reference.

Observations

Limited Brush Settings: FireAlpaca has very limited brush settings. It's possible to make brushes change in size and opacity with pressure, but it's not possible to freely control how pressure affects size and pressure.

Tabbed Views Only: although it's possible to create a second view of an image in FireAlpaca, it's not possible to place two views side by side like you would be able to do in basically every other software that has this feature. I'm not quite sure what is the point of this view feature if you can't do this, to be honest.

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