Gonna Paint Your Dragon

...Gonna use oil based paint, because the wood is pine.

• The Simpsons, All Singing, All Dancing

The basics of Blender texture painting and Ucupaint.

So, one of the things we wanted to do in Q2 2025 was to learn Ucupaint, to see how it could augment/replace our 2D workflow for creating avatars.

And it was a lot easier to learn than we thought - so here's some notes. This is not a full tutorial, this is just to spark ideas and let you know what to search for if you do want to give it a go.

This article features the Vulper by Reval, as the avatar we were working on at the time.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was meant to be uploaded closer to October but we kind of stalled on it with everything going on.

...part of it may have being knowing what we wanted for the header image and not having the energy to make it.

the basics

Install Ucupaint by following their instructions depending on Blender version. For us, that was installing from Blender's extension store.

Blender is an editor dependent on switching modes - which can be done using the dropdown at the top left of the viewport.

For the purpose of this, we can ignore all of them except Object Mode (to select the mesh we