Jehan Pagès of Girin Studio project recently started adding a symmetric mode to painting tools in GIMP. And he could do with your help.

The feature is very useful for digital painting, typically at the sketching stage. Among open tools Alchemy was probably the first to get it. Krita and MyPaint followed next, and now GIMP is joining the club.

(Hint: see a new series of tutorials on digital painting with Krita by David Revoy to get an idea where and when symmetric panting can be used.)

The initial implementation that Jehan came up with is essentially a proof of concept, as seen on the video below:

Jehan expects to complete the symmetric painting feature in few weeks, but he needs financial support, so he started a fundraiser at OpenFunding. While the community is donating, he still has some design decisions to make, such as:

whether it should be a per-tool setting, a global mode, or something else;

if the kinds of symmetry axis should be locked to horizontal, vertical, and central, or be freely configurable;

how exactly it should work on the GEGL (the new image processing core) side of things.

Again, when it comes to credibility, Jehan has proved it beyond any doubts: he's been contributing to the project for about a year. Mostly he's been doing the boring part of the work like fixing bugs. But recently he also started adding new features like configuring default snapping settings in the Preferences dialog.

Needless to say, the feature would be part of GIMP 2.10, so no forks, no dead code. Interested? Head over to OpenFunding page and give love. I mean, money.