Top 10 Gifts for Aspiring Artists

Painter is like a well-stocked artist's studio, without the mess. With textured surfaces, brushes and tools, you can mimic painting and drawing with chalk, pastels, watercolors, oils, crayons, pencil, felt pens, ink, and more. Painter also offers many non-traditional tools for special effects as well as features for photo enhancement, Web graphics, animation, and working with text.

Nothing goes better with Painter than a Wacom graphics tablet for the most natural digital painting experience. For digital art, the professional Intuos3 line gives you the most control and comfort in a graphics tablet. The Intuos3 line also offers additional accessories you can use with your tablet such as an airbrush, inking pen, or the 6D art pen. Each tool can have its own unique settings. Wacom Intuos3 is the only graphics tablet offering tilt sensitivity, an important feature for artistic applications.

ArtRage is an inexpensive, fun, and easy-to-learn program for experimenting with digital art in Windows, Tablet PC or Mac OS. The user interface is absolutely gorgeous and designed for ultimate ease of use. Children and adults alike will have a ton of fun painting and drawing with art tools that act and interact just like real-world paint, pens, pencils, crayons, and even glitter! ArtRage comes in a Free Starter Edition, but the full edition only costs US$25.

Cher Threinen-Pendarvis's Painter books are always excellent. In "The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book: Creative Techniques in Digital Painting," she brings together her expertise in Painter, Photoshop, and the use of pressure-sensitive tablets, to show readers how they can draw and paint with a computer. This art book and guide includes traditional drawing and painting theory exercises, real-life projects, and the author's own art work and creative techniques.

This is an essential boook for both new and an experienced Painter users. Nearly 400 full-color pages are chock full of step-by-step tutorials and tips to help you understand the tools and functions of Painter. Coupled with professional techniques and incredible examples, The Painter Wow! Book is sure to unlock your creativity and inspire you.

Put together the top plug-in collections from top plug-in software developer and what do you get? Unlimited creativity at a great price! Alien Skin's Eye Candy Effects Collection combines five awesome plug-in filter collections for a total of 54 effects:

• Eye Candy Impact, with 10 special effects
• Eye Candy Texture, with 10 texture effects
• Eye Candy Nature, with 10 natural effects
• Xenofex 2, with 14 special effects
• Snap Art, with 10 artistic effects

Xara Xtreme is a top-notch graphics tool, no matter what your level of experience. If you're a non-artist just getting started with illustration software, Xara offers tutorials and video demos to help you learn. If you're a professional illustrator, Xara Xtreme holds its own against the leading drawing packages in features, and totally blows them away in terms of performance. Unlike most art-oriented software, Xtreme is vector-based rather than pixel-based. But for art-oriented users who want to get into vector-based editing, I feel that Xara Xtreme is the best choice. A Linux version is also available.

Corel Painter Essentials is designed to help beginners or non-artists create digital art and turn photos into art work. Users can turn photos into paintings automatically, or by working with the cloning tools manually. Painter Essentials also includes many natural media brushes such as acrylics, airbrushes, art pens, oils, blenders, chalk, crayons, watercolors, palette knives, pastels, pencils, etc. It also provides an ideal upgrade path to Painter for those who wish to go to the next level. Buying Painter Essentials and then upgrading to Painter X can often cost less than buying Painter outright.

Digital Art Studio: Techniques for Combining Inkjet Printing with Traditional Art Materials shows you how to integrate traditional art techniques and digital media through both instruction and beautifully illustrated examples. Readers will learn how to push the boundaries of artistic process, often using little more than the common ink jet printer (although a large format printer is recommended for many techniques).

The Logitech NuLOOQ navigator is a unique productivity-enhancing control device for anyone who works with creative software on a regular basis. It occupies very little desk space, and sets alongside your keyboard and mouse, trackpad, or graphics tablet as you control it with your other hand. The NuLOOQ is pre-configured to work with Adobe Creative Suite 2, Photoshop Elements, Microsoft Word and Excel, Firefox, Macromedia Flash, and more. I found the device quite flexible and comfortable to use, and it definitely increased my productivity, especially for photo editing and design tasks.