Stencils and rulers make it easy to constrain your work. While most of the interface is touch-friendly, it’s not all quite there yet: Adjusting layer opacity still requires the keyboard, for example. You can pan, zoom, and rotate the canvas with two fingers, making for a very natural workflow. Other tools show up as floating panels, which are easy to drag and resize using large, comfortable grippers, and automatically wink out of existence as you paint near them.
Radial toolbars at the bottom two corners of the screen let me quickly switch tools and adjust colors without fiddling with menus. I tested it with a simple stylus and one of the new breed of touchscreen-enabled laptops, the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13. Paint over an area again, and colors will blend, leaving visible brush strokes.ĪrtRage’s interface is simple to pick up, with most functions in easy reach. Paper and brush both have textures load your brush with paint and draw it across the canvas with one long stroke, and it will gradually fade out. Much like Corel Painter Lite and its older sibling, Corel Painter, ArtRage simulates natural media. The Symmetry feature makes for interesting paintings that sometimes look like koalas. ArtRage joins these accessible tools with its own touch-friendly interface and an attractive $50 price tag. More modern tools like SpeedyPainter and Corel Painter Lite show that creating beautiful, natural-looking art using a computer is possible, and doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. But Microsoft Paint is at the very bottom of the painting totem pole, often associated squiggly-looking Rage Guy memes.
Artrage review borodante software#
Unfortunately, software for painting often gets a bad rep: I don’t mean image-editing (Photoshop), but actual painting (Microsoft Paint).