Milton is a simple and straightforward painting tool which does its best to stay out of your way, but still has some unusual tricks of its own.

The core drawing tools are basic. Just one round brush, with colour, size and opacity settings, and an eraser (or infinite undo) if you’ve made a mistake.

We’re not going to continue listing drawing or editing features here, because there aren’t any. No Fill, no geometric shapes, no text tool, no bundled library of clipart: Milton is just about painting.

Where Milton starts to win out is in its underlying technology: you’re painting with vector strokes, not bitmaps. This means you can freely zoom in or out almost infinitely to add more detail or fine-tune your creation.

You’re not restricted to a fixed-size canvas, either. Need more space in a particular area? Just click the mouse wheel and drag to move your painting in the other direction, and carry on working.

Milton. Beautifully simple.

There’s simple layer support. Again, we really do mean simple, but it’s still very welcome.

The “just paint” philosophy continues with the lack of a “Save” button. Milton automatically saves your work, complete with undo history, whenever you close the program.

And any or all of your creation may be freely exported to a PNG or JPG.

If you’re looking for a minimalist, easy-to-use paint tool (and you don’t mind the total lack of drawing tools) then Milton could be a good choice, and as it’s open-source and portable there are no issues in giving it a try. Take a look.

Milton is an open-source application for Windows 7 and later.