SmoothDraw is a natural painting and digital free-hand drawing software that can produce high quality pictures, with an intuitive UI. It supports many kinds of brushes (pen, pencil, dry media. Why SmartDraw is the Best Drawing Program Intelligent Formatting Only SmartDraw offers you intelligent formatting with keyboard shortcuts and simple commands that draw your charts for you.
SmoothDraw is a free painting and drawing program that delivers features and quality that we'd only expect to find in something we'd have to pay for, and we think that anyone who likes to create digital art should check it out.
The program's interface is intuitive, with toolbars down the left side and across the top. SmoothDraw comes with a wide variety of tools, including various pencils, pens, airbrushes, paintbrushes, hatch brushes and so on. There are also grass and star stamps and an image hose, all of which are a lot of fun to use. Users can adjust the brush size and ink flow for each brush, and there are also settings for tablet pressure and hardness. Cloning and retouching tools, important parts of any image-editing arsenal, are present as well, and layering capabilities let users create complex images. Unfortunately, the program doesn't have a Help file, which would have been useful for those who don't have much experience with digital art. But even users who haven't tried anything more sophisticated than Microsoft Paint will have fun experimenting with SmoothDraw. Overall, we think that SmoothDraw is a great choice for users of all abilities; it's accessible enough that beginners can use it, but it packs enough advanced features to be useful to serious artists.
SmoothDraw installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls cleanly. We recommend this program to all users.
What do you need to know about free software?
Why spend big bucks on graphics software when you can get many, if not most, of the same features from freeware? Here are three mui-expensive graphics apps and their free counterparts:
- Adobe Illustrator Available for Windows only, Creative Docs .NET (yeah, weird name) is a vector-based graphic design tool for creating illustrations, manuals, flow charts, icons, and the like. It offers advanced features like Bezier curves, styles, convert-to-curves, and curved-path text.
- Adobe Photoshop You've actually got two choices here: GIMP, which is available for all platforms, and Paint.NET, which is Windows-only. Both programs offer powerful, Photoshop-caliber image-editing tools, everything from layers to special effects.
- Corel Draw Want to sketch, draw, paint, etc? In addition to an assortment of 'digital brushes' including chalks, charcoals, and pencils, Artweaver offers the usual array of image-editing tools: crop, gradient-fill, transparency, layers, and so on. It also supports (and, in fact, recommends) tablet PCs for a more realistic drawing/painting feel.