IPaint is an animation editing program for the ICON

Unisys ICON

The ICON was a computer built specifically for use in schools, to fill a standard created by the Ontario Ministry of Education. They were widely used, mostly in high schools in the mid- to late 1980s, but disappeared after that time with the widespread introduction of PCs and Apple Macintoshes...

 computer.

IPaint animates drawings on the principle of points that act as pivots. To animate a figure, the user creates a line drawing, then copies the drawing to a new frame and moves the figure's points to new positions. IPaint then calculates the tweening

Tweening

Inbetweening or tweening is the process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that the first image evolves smoothly into the second image. Inbetweens are the drawings between the key frames which help to create the illusion of motion...

 frames. This results in the figure appearing to move between its position in the first frame and its position in the second frame.

IPaint, in its most recent version IPaintII, released in 1995, supports two-colour drawings.

Origin

IPaint was produced by the Ergonomics Lab at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

. The Ergonomics Lab created a number of popular programs for the ICON in addition to IPaint: ITalk, MusicLand, ChemistryLand, Build-A-Bird.

IPaint was designed by Martin Lamb and programmed primarily by Jim Martin.