Art Rage

This morning I found a new program. It's called Art Rage 2.

I love it. This program must have been designed by a traditional artist. I am not a digital artist and this is the first program of its kind I have used that didn't intimidate me. It has a very soft, very user friendly interface. It's a bit like Painter without the gazillion tweakabilities. It is very simple, but I think that's what I love about it.

You can choose from many different types of paper, all of them can be adjusted. The tools are simple, paint, chalk/pastels, airbrush, crayons, pens & pencils. In the default settings, paint goes down wet, and blends with the next color you pick (as it would in life) unless you choose Auto Dry. The paintbrush also retains a bit of the color you were just using unless you choose Auto Clean or dip your brush in the little cup of water provided. I love this feature. It also allows you to rotate your canvas easily, something that is great for me because at certain angles I have a very hard time drawing a straight line. You can also easily adjust the paintbrush size, wetness, etc. The default setting gives the paintbrush a very nice texture, that can also be adjusted. There is a confetti/glitter brush as well...fun, but not something I'd use a lot. Of course if you have a Wacom tablet, it is very compatible and allows for adjustments of pressure sensitivity.

The palette knife is great...it blends the paint easily (top right of example), chalk/pastel and crayon with a little more difficulty (bottom left), and has no effect on the felt pens. Isn't that the way it is in real life?

The program allows layers and importing and exporting files as jpgs, pngs, bmps and psds (Photoshop files).

The two major things it lacks are a 'fill bucket' and the 'magicwand/selection' tools. This doesn't bother me in the least...as a traditional artist I don't have these options at my art table either. It also lacks watercolor. But, I have yet to find a program that can simulate watercolor properly. I don't use it in Photoshop or Painter, as it is just too uniform and predictable.

The really wonderful thing about this program is that it's $20.00 for the full version! (I spent more on lunch a couple days ago.) It's worth every silly penny, in my opinion.

I would recommend ANYONE try this program...at least the free version. And kids would absolutely love this, too.