ArtRage painting program
I’ve spent the evening playing with ArtRage 2, a great little painting application which I discovered via Bzangy Groink. It’s purely a painting program as opposed to a Photoshop wannabe, and does a brilliant job of creating paint effects.
Thick paint smears and blends, pencils and chalks smudge, and markers work just like they do in the real world. Many of the tools can be adjusted to give different effects. You can paint with thinned oils, use wet or dry markers, soften your pencil and control the hardness of the crayon, and much more.
The program enables you to import images to ‘trace’, and can automatically load your brush with the correct colour from the underlying picture. I especially like the option of washing out brushes in the jar of water.
The interface takes a bit of getting used to, but UI designers at Adobe could learn a thing or two from it (for example, palettes moving out the way when you paint near them, and the zoom tool, which I found really intuitive).
ArtRage is available for Mac and Windows and, best of all, there’s a free version as well as the full version (which is a steal at only $20!).
On an unrelated note (well, perhaps a tenuous ‘free things for computers’ theme), the Streetmap Firefox Extension is pretty handy - highlight a UK street name or postcode and right-click to launch a map of it from Streetmap, Multimap or Google Maps.
- iBook 1, Pinot 0
- School’s out for Christmas!
