Amanda Sexton 04 Jan 2013

Also another great alternative is GIMP. I use to use it before I got photoshop. Another great program to use is artrage, it's free and it has a cheep upgrade.

Abbigail Ward 18 Mar 2013

Testing out open source and freeware art programs seems to be a hobby of mine, so I figured I would share a little bit of what I have found out.

There is a nice list of free programs with links and brief descriptions made by the artist Feohria on deviantart. I would post a link, but I am not sure if that goes against the forum rules or not.

Personally, my favorite free programs are Gimp for photo editing, Mypaint which is made solely for drawing and painting and has a nice simple interface, and Alchemy for thumbnails and sketching.

Krita is also a nice free photo editing program and also has a multi-brush tool which is pretty neat. Unfortunately, it can be kind of buggy on Windows since it is Linux based.

If you want a free alternative to Illustrator, Inkscape is kind of nice too. Though I haven't used it much since I am still kind of new to vectors.

I've tried Twistedbrush before, it was alright, but not really my favorite. My picture Downeast Sunset was painted in Artrage though, I did enjoy that program when I had it on my old computer. If you don't want to pay to upgrade Artrage, I would strongly urge to check out Mypaint, they have a lot of the same concepts, but it is completely open source.

If anyone wants to ask me any questions about the programs I have listed or wants links to tutorials, I don't mind trying to help. I am a big supporter of open source programs :).

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