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Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). Tux Paint is used in schools around the world as a computer literacy drawing activity. It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

Kids are presented with a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help them be creative. Along with paintbrush, shapes and text, Tux Paint includes a "stamp" feature to add pre-drawn or photographic imagery to pictures, and a set of "magic tools" that provide filter effects (like blur, tint and waves) and interesting drawing tools (like train tracks, bubbles and grass).

Tux Paint includes a collection of "starter" images, both coloring-book style and photo-realistic, and a large collections of stamps are available as a separate download. Additional content can be added by parents and teachers, or downloaded from 3rd parties.

This application can be a seemingly never-ending source of entertainment for your kids, especially if they like drawing.

Easy and Fun
Tux Paint is meant to be a simple drawing program for young children. It is not meant as a general-purpose drawing tool. It is meant to be fun and easy to use. Sound effects and a cartoon character help let the user know what's going on, and keeps them entertained. There are also extra-large cartoon-style mouse pointer shapes.

Extensibility
Tux Paint is extensible. Brushes and "rubber stamp" shapes can be dropped in and pulled out. For example, a teacher can drop in a collection of animal shapes and ask their students to draw an ecosystem. Each shape can have a sound which is played, and textual facts which are displayed, when the child selects the shape.

Portability
Tux Paint is portable among various computer platforms: Windows, Linux, etc. The interface looks the same among them all. Tux Paint runs suitably well on older systems (like a Pentium 133), and can be built to run better on slow systems.

Simplicity
There is no direct access to the computer's underlying intricacies. The current image is kept when the program quits, and reappears when it is restarted. Saving images requires no need to create filenames or use the keyboard. Opening an image is done by selecting it from a collection of thumbnails. Access to other files on the computer is restricted.