PaintIRL

PaintIRL is an oil painting app that tries to feel like real paint: thick brushstrokes, canvas texture, colours that mix the way paint does. It runs on macOS (Metal) and in the browser (WebGPU), and you can also drive it from other software over OSC, a bit like sending commands to a plotter.

The author, Lingdong Huang, paints with it himself — the repo shows his own paintings, including re-creations of the classic peppers and Goldhill test images, built up stroke by stroke. A web version is live at paint-irl.netlify.app (it needs a WebGPU-capable browser), and there is a first binary release for Mac.

The project has 36 stars on GitHub, and the author is upfront about how it was made: "mostly vibe-coded, so don't look too hard inside" — but, he adds, it seems to work well. Seven commits so far, last touched on 31 October.

A few honest limits: it is a small side project, not a pro painting suite — no layers, brushes or export workflow to speak of — and the web version simply shows a "WebGPU is not available" message in browsers without it. The Mac build is the full experience.