These art-oriented software programs are designed especially for painting, drawing, coloring, and creating original art work. Although some of them also offers tools for working with pre-existing images, the emphasis is on art and the creation process. Most of them have tools to mimic traditional artistic media such as oils, watercolors, acrylics, pencils, markers, crayons, chalk, pastels, and felt pens. Many of them also offer a variety of unusual, non-traditional tools. (Updated: Nov. 2009)
1. Corel Painter (Windows and Macintosh)
© Corel
Corel 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 non-traditional tools such as image hose, pattern pens, cloners, and special effects. While its strong point is its artistic toolset, Painter also offers features for photo enhancement, Web graphics creation, animation, and working with text.
2. ArtRage - Free (Windows and Macintosh)
© Ambient Design
ArtRage is a fun, 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! If you're not sure if digital art is for you, give the free version a try. It's time unlimited but lacks a few of the tools in the full version. For just US$25 the full edition is totally worth it for the extra features.
3. Corel Painter Essentials (Windows and Macintosh)
© Corel
Corel Painter Essentials is a simplified, home-user version of Corel Painter professional-level art software. It's designed to help beginners or non-artists create digital art and turn photos into art work. Although it is certainly more limited than Painter, Essentials has a worthy set of tools and effects to allow users to explore digital art without being overwhelmed by too many options. It also provides an ideal upgrade path to Painter; buying Painter Essentials and then upgrading to Painter can often cost less than buying Painter outright.
4. Alien Skin Snap Art (Windows and Macintosh)
© Alien Skin
Alien Skin Snap Art is a collection of ten filters that can give your photos the artistic styling of colored pencil, Impasto, Pointillism, pen and ink, pencil sketch, pastels, comics, watercolor, oil painting, and Pop Art. Snap Art comes with hundreds of settings presets as well as manual controls, so users can transform photos into art work quickly and with the precise level of detail that they desire. Snap Art requires a host photo editor program such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo.
5. ArtWeaver - Free (Windows)
© Boris Eyrich
Artweaver is a free painting and drawing program for Windows that will look very familiar to anyone who has used Photoshop or Painter in the past. Artweaver features a number of natural media brushes and tools such as chalk, pencils, charcoal, oil paint, felt markers, crayons, airbrushes, acrylic, sponges, pastels, and cloners. Each brush has a number of attributes that can be adjusted for even more variety. In addition, Artweaver offers a solid set of general image manipulation and enhancement tools.
