Product Reviews

Paint' programs have been around longer than the PC, but ones that actually resemble real painting are a rarer breed. The leading 'natural media' package is Corel's Painter X, an amazing piece of software if you have £215 and plenty of time to spare. Even the cut-down version, Painter Essentials, costs £60 and takes a while to learn.

Enter ArtRage. At around £12.50 in proper money, it's an essential buy if you have any interest at all in graphics, or a child in the house. There's a free Starter version if you want to give it a go first.

ArtRage doesn't have such a wide range of art media as the likes of Painter, but you get a choice of pencil, pen, crayon, chalk, oil paints, airbrush, and even glitter. Each tool can be adjusted

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in size and various other parameters. Even better, you can use tools like a palette knife to scrape over the paint you've put on, smearing it realistically.

If you have a graphics tablet, you can paint and draw with the stylus, and tilt sensing is now supported if your tablet has it. But you can also paint very effectively with the mouse, thanks to ArtRage's rotating cursor. With oil paints, this turns the brush head as you drag it, smooshing the paint around very satisfyingly.

Layers, as in a photo editing program, allow you to paint on multiple transparent sheets, each with an opacity level and blending mode to govern how it affects what's underneath. Stencils, the biggest new feature in 2.5, are really clever. You can choose from a variety of ready-made shapes, or load your own image as a stencil. Plain black-and-white images work like a real stencil: when you paint over them, the paint only goes through the 'cut-out' areas. Images with shades of grey (or colour) work more subtly, with paint partially passing through. By switching to a different mode, you can even draw along a stencil's edges with a pen or pencil, like with a traditional lettering stencil.

There's no text facility, and, unlike Painter, ArtRage doesn't do watercolours. Within those limitations, ArtRage is a brilliant program at a ridiculous price.