ArtRage Studio Pro version 3 is a professional graphics drawing program with all the tools you need for drawing, painting and graphic design on your computer.
Ease of Use, Performance: 23/25
Look & Feel: 23/25
Features 23/25
How much I enjoy 24/25
Total: 93/100
When looking at sites like deviantART the first thing that comes to mind is how do those computer artists come up with all those digital pictures and art. The simple question comes down to software with 4 simple choices; ArtRage Studio Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop and Corel Painter with prices being a major factor.
PhotoShop is an image editor designed around photos while Illustrator costs around $400, Corel Painter costs around $200 but ArtRage Studio Pro costs about $80. Ambient Design offers two current editions of their painting program with the Studio that costs $40 while the ArtRage Studio Pro costing $80.
ArtRage Studio Pro is a raster graphics editing program that paints or draws down to the pixel instead of vector graphics that uses points and lines which is better for other applications. ArtRage makes use of a wide variety of tools that behave like the real thing to add a realistic touch to computerized art to get your art to look like you want it to.
ArtRage Studio Pro is the full version with all the tools and features available for painting, drawing and creating original artwork on the computer. The Studio edition has fewer features while the ArtRage Studio Pro has all the features like the palette knife to blend or paint with and other tools like the airbrush.
ArtRage Studio Pro has all the features you could want in a painting, drawing and art program like a wide choice of brushes, air brushing and drawing with pencils, chalk and even pens and stencils. The program includes the full line of brushes with direct control of pressure, thinning and color bleed from a setting panel.
You can use a drawing tablet for easier work and painting along with features like pressure sensitivity if your tablet has that feature. Not only does it add to the creativity of the drawing or painting it also helps to create unique artwork that a mouse and cursor just does not allow.
The program has a lot of features including a wide assortment of paint brush tools, airbrushing tools, a palette knife to mix and smear paint on the canvas as well as add paint to your artwork. Drawing and painting tools include rulers, crayons, pencils, pens, chalk, stencils and even glitter but other features include metallic colors and various color palettes.
The program starts with a menu bar in the upper left corner with a color picker in the lower right hand corner while a tool menu is in the lower left corner. The two corner color and tool menus are quarter circle panels that fit neatly into the corner and even disappears temporarily if you draw or paint into that area.
Choosing settings like layers, stencils and stickers can be changed by the use of additional moveable menu widgets that you can rearrange or even remove from your page. The use of the corner quarter panels is a unique tool feature and they work well but do not get in your way with being able to resize your canvas or disappearing.
The program default is a simple white background with the edges slightly greyed out but you can change the background color to your liking. You can use the zoom tool to focus on certain areas or zoom out to view the whole work easily from the top menu bar which can be hidden if you like.
ArtRage uses layers so you can work on different parts of a multilayered drawing or painting and even put photos and other peoples work in the back ground to copy and paint over. You can then remove the background picture to show your unique artwork or use the program to draw and paint on pictures to add to the image for personalized photos.
While ArtRage is not considered a regular image editor for photos you can do some basic editing and it does include a few image editing features like crop. While ArtRage is not a decently featured image editing software it can handle a little editing but is more an artwork program.
You cannot do automatic features for image editing like brightness and contrast but you can add and draw over images to create unique and fun photos. You can also use the layers to work on technique and get practice at painting by copying other works or painting over real images.
I tried this by taking a real life picture of a plane and painting my own concept artwork that worked out pretty well and is a good technique for learning how to paint and draw. You can use ArtRage to practice painting and drawing as well as create your own original artwork using paint, pen or pencil and other mediums including airbrushes.
Some additional features like various paints including metallic colors, paint straight from the tube, spray painting stencils and text round out the features but are not all you can do. You can use the spray stencil tool and spray paint baubles like marbles or dice onto your canvas to add to an image or create your own unique wallpaper.
The program can be used for both computer images as well as printing your artwork with export as JPEG, GIF and other formats along with print features. ArtRage Studio Pro has a lot of features and with all the tools available it makes a fantastic and inexpensive digital art program.
ArtRage is a fully featured drawing and painting program that is an easy recommendation even as a trial at letting your inner artist out. I highly recommend ArtRage Studio Pro for a fully featured and inexpensive art program that only costs $80 for the full edition.