Does anybody know if anyone ever made a tool like the image hose in painter that would work in gimp? I just think it'd be cool for tedious things like foliage and grass painting.... make up your own little set of images and then just spray them on with variable randomization options... Not an essential tool obviously, but handy in handy for a few things.

Gimp paint studio has brush presets for grass and foliage and they are pretty good.

I'd suggest using Tux Paint for that. If you are unfamiliar with the program, Rolf has a nice introductory video on MeetTheGIMP.

This will allow you to easily create rotating brushes including random. http://registry.gimp.org/node/16231 I think it's a 2.6 script and might not work with 2.8. Other random effects can be achieved with Gimp's paint dynamics options. ( http://www.gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4600 )

Wow, is that tux paint ever fun. I was trying to figure a way to import my own picture into it but I guess that isn't possible is it?
I couldn't get any video out of the video intro, just the audio part of it.

It's totally possible, all you need to do is create your own brushes. There's tutorials for creating GIMP brush pipes on the GIMP homepage somewhere. You can have various "frames" in your brush pipe and set them to vary randomly, in preset order, or according to direction or pressure or tilt... it's quite versatile once you get the hang of it - especially when combined with the new 2.8 brush engine.

Cool, I'll have to look into that, it's been a while since I was into Gimp last... Guess I need to brush up on the newer possibilities... thanks for pointing me in the right direction.