This might be true, but my daughter (13) uses Gimp to draw. But then again, she might be an expert because she is recording a 'Lets draw Mangas' thread on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhMwfWFG5GI

She might very well be. Using Gimp for content creation for some time could make her an expert (especially a fast learning and seemingly quite intelligent kid). Though painting itself isn't the main usecase gimp seems to want to support.

Though like so often: Only because a software wants to support a specific target doesn't mean it will be completely unusable for doing everything else.

Funny, my daughter's 13 too and constantly drawing manga characters with Gimp (http://julieflorac78.deviantart.com/gallery/). I've just bought her a wacom tablet, that's much easier.

funny^2 - she just got a wacom tablet for christmas :-). did you get the wheel to work with gimp?

No, but AFAIK it doesn't work yet with Linux. The other buttons work out of the box, though.

Ah ok - she is on win7. doesn't work either, though.

let her try mypaint! it is made for drawing and rocks.

What do you do with the rocks?

Paint.

Target or not, that's what I am and I've been using Gimp for all my photo work for over 10 years.

Thanks, I had not heard about that before. Although a little sad, as I know a lot of casual users using it right now (even including some young kids). But I guess at least the "Creating Original Art" can be seen as targeting people like game developers.

Casual users (including kids) have been creating art with Photoshop for some time now.

At any rate, there are multiple free software packages that can do the "creating art" job at least as acceptably as GIMP. Consider MyPaint or Krita.

MyPaint and Krita are actually both great programs for digital painting. David Revoy is an artist who uses both (and also created one of the brush sets for MyPaint) and his work is worth looking at: http://www.davidrevoy.com/2-portfolio.html

He has a number of tutorials available on his site too: http://www.davidrevoy.com/4-tutorials.html

I believe he also uses Gimp with the Gimp Paint Studio presets for some things: http://code.google.com/p/gps-gimp-paint-studio/