Artrage 2 from Ambient Designs does pretty much the same thing as Corel’s Painter – it allows you to create paintings and sketches that look as though they were created with natural media, such as oil-paints and watercolours.

However in other ways, it’s totally different from Painter. For starters, it costs less than £20, compared to Painter’s £200-plus price tag. It’s also a lot simpler than Painter, so it’s probably a better choice for newcomers who want to try their hand at computer art.

The program’s interface is relatively straightforward. A palette in the lower-left corner displays icons for the various types of brushes, such as oil paints, crayons, airbrushes and even a sparkly ‘glitter’ brush.

These tools don’t provide the same depth of detail as their counterparts in Painter – where you can even define the behaviour of the brush bristles – but it’s easier to click on one and get started without having to worry about the endless settings and parameters you find in Painter.

Our only complaint here is that the inclusion of tooltips would help beginners by making it easier to identify the tools that are available.

Once you’ve selected a brush, you can modify the brush settings in a separate palette, perhaps increasing the thickness of the paint or the way the brush tapers.

There’s also an option to bring in an image, such as a digital photo, which you can trace over and use as the basis for a painting. You’ll need a bit of artistic talent to produce decent results, though, as Artrage 2 lacks Painter’s options for automatically converting photos into paintings.

Even so, it’s about £200 cheaper than Painter, so it provides very good value for money and is a great way to start experimenting with computer art and illustration.

Also consider:
Corel Painter X
Versatile but complex paint package

Photoshop CS3 Beta
The pre-launch version of Adobe’s market-leading image editor heralds yet more pixel-punishing power

Ulead Photoimpact 12
A competent photo-editing package with a collection of basic and advanced features

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