Like SAI, it offers a smooth experience when painting and minimal lagging. The latest version has launched with a clean and easy-to-use interface that is still packed full of useful functions and features. It’s great for those just getting started in digital art as well as experienced amateurs and professionals. Meanwhile, a popular raster-based graphic design program is Corel Painter.
The level of detail and quality that you can achieve is remarkable. You can adjust the workspace to suit your needs and explore the different brushes and textures, including packs made by other artists. If you don’t get on well with the product or are looking for more advanced features, here are some other options for graphic design.įor free access to powerful software, artists can experiment with the paint tools in Krita, an open-source illustration tool. Arty alternativesĪll in all, this software has some excellent tools for drawing and painting, but it isn’t the only software available. PaintTool also provides anti-aliasing, which minimizes any distortion and jagged edges of your digital images. The canvases are customizable, and you can save your color palette with your mixed colors, so you can pick up where you left off. If your focus is drawing and painting, this program has plenty to offer. After that, you can obtain the license for SAI with a one-off purchase. There is a free trial of the program available for 31 days, which lets you access all features. Try it for yourselfįortunately, you can discover if PaintTool SAI has the right features for you. It cannot also print directly from the app, although you can export your work as PSD or BMP files. It’s a compact and lightweight program, after all. SAI works well with creating textures and colors, but adding text or gradients isn’t included. There are also limits on what you can add to your canvas. The main focus is creating new artwork, so it isn’t suitable if you are looking for a tool that will also give you photo-editing capabilities. That is down to the fact that there isn’t an extensive number of features.
The interface of this paint tool is easy to navigate, so finding the tools and functions you need takes no time at all. It’s useful for adding the finishing touches before saving your piece, as you can soften any hard edges. There is an eraser tool that takes on the properties of the different brushes. This enables you to erase a layer, move it to a different part of the drawing, or lock layers together. Creative capacityĪs well as the main tools for adding color, SAI also has features for adding and editing layers and selecting areas of your artwork. You can adjust the pressure of the brush, so it responds differently to your touch. Different effects are achieved by using different brushes when drawing, including airbrush, watercolor, and pen. There is also an option to change the luminescence. You can change the appearance of a color by adjusting saturation. The choice of colors is excellent, which means if you can imagine it, you can create it. Picking up the way it works and the different tools is easy, so the learning curve is a fun experience instead of a challenge. Anyone who likes to get expressive with their digital pen can be creative with this program. It works on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. One of the reasons it has earned so many fans is because it offers full digitized support. As an extra, I've included a set of "Airbrush Pencils" which are my favorite brushes in SAI.SAI is a popular product among online artists communities, including DeviantArt. (*) Update if you're having issues with the start-sai.exe, download this pack and extract it into your main SAI directory (where the SAI program is), the brushes should show up automatically next time you run SAI), they may overwrite your brush list but I've put them at the bottom so unless you have any brushes there, it shouldn't be any problem.
I recommend using these brushes on A4 page size at 150 DPI and with stroke stabilizer at level 3 but use whatever you feel comfortable with.įeel free to adjust the pressure to your taste, some press harder than others so you may have to adjust.Ĭhange the Simple Circle to Flat and now you have a square tip shading pencil. Create a new "Brush" and manually adjust the settings like you see here, you could also use the Marker, Watercolor, Airbrush. Run start-sai.exe to install the textures. Extract the RAR into your Paint Tool SAI folder (install 7zip if you don't have winRAR). Here are a couple of pencil brushes that I made for Paint Tool SAI in order to mimic graphite pencil, to install them follow these instructions*: