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Artrage is a painting programme with attitude.
It allows users to achieve realistic paint effects on your computer with
fun and flair.
It is an easy to use programme that will suit anyone from child through
to experienced artist
On opening Artrage you will find a funky modern yet simple interface
This simple yet effective design allows you to have all your tools at
your fingertips.
On the bottom left are your painting tools which include Brush, pencil,
palette knife, airbrush, chalk, glitter, roller,paint tube, marker pen
crayon and eraser.
While this variety looks awesome enough they can each be adjusted individually
as well.
With the palette on the mid left you can adjust variations of pressure
and amount of paint held by the brush, the amount of “thinners”
you wish to use with your paint or the softness of the pencil or chalk
allowing the user infinite variety of painting styles
Here I have used the paint brush with 4 different settings – adjusting
the loading, thinners and pressure on each different stroke.
Each of the tools is designed to work like its real life counterpart .
You can add thinners to your paint, wet the tip of your marker, use a
hard or soft pencil, you can adjust the angle of your airbrush.
From the website here is a list of the tools and some of their uses.
* Oil Brush: Apply, smear, and blend oil strokes, or
add thinners and apply smooth strokes.
* Pencil: Sketch or scribble with the variable softness
pencil tool.
* Airbrush: Spray smooth strokes on to your canvas or
let the paint build up in one spot, create dagger stroke tapering lines,
and change the tilt of your stylus to adjust the shape of the spray.
* Glitter: Sprinkle thousands of tiny glitter sparkles,
great with the new Metallic Paint option.
* Paint Roller: Lay down smooth, solid
bands of color with thick or thin paint.
* Paint Tube: A never ending tube of
oil paint that can be squeezed out on to your canvas when you want a large
blob for smearing.
* Color Sampler: Sample color directly
from your canvas or references images.
* Felt Pen: Soft tipped or hard tipped,
dry or wet pens that give a wide range of effects.
* Palette Knife, Chalk, Crayon, Eraser: Simple but effective
tools that give realistic results
While it is completely possible to use your mouse to paint in artrage
it really comes into its own with the use of a pressure sensitive pen
and graphics tablet.
By pressing harder with your pen you leave more paint on the canvas
- Press lighter and the paint tails off.
The great thing is you don’t need to understand or know how to
use any of the tools – just click on them and paint away –
of course if you have an art background then you are going to be able
to achieve some incredible results
But wait – there’s more!!!!!
Artrage has a metallic option – click the metallic box and you
are painting with metallic effect paints or sprinkling metallic glitter.
You can choose from a wide range of canvas textures, colours and options
all of which are individually adjustable to allow for a multitude of canvas
types
Better than in real life painting, Artrage supports layers – you
can put different parts of your painting on a different layer –
and adjust the opacity and visibility of these layers as you desire, and
what’s more you can then export a single layer or the entire image
as a png, jpg or psd file( complete with layers intact).
But perhaps the best thing about artrage is its tracing ability .
You can load any image to trace from and when you use the tools artrage
will if you wish it to - pick up the colours from the original image to
assist with a realistic painting. ( You can however also choose your own
colours )
Here I have loaded a photo of a daffodil
You can adjust the opacity of the tracing image and you can zoom in and
out and move the canvas about to suit yourself as you go.
I can now add a layer and sketch the outline of the daffodil
Im not the worlds best artist – but Artrage makes it easy for me
to choose the right colours for my the flower itself.
By using the glitter option I can even get some fun texture into my painting
I love the fact I can dab on paint of various colours and smudge it all
together using the palette knife
So you’re not quite as challenged with a paint brush as me???-
Artrage caters for you too – you can stick a reference image on
your canvas to copy from – or you can just work from scratch on
that customisable blank canvas.
I am the first to admit I’m quite challenged when it comes to using
a paintbrush- but with Artrage I can have all the fun without the mess!!!
There is much more to Artrage than I can go into here, but as a scrapbook
designer I can see limitless possibilities on the horizon for me!!
With the trend toward painterly style backgrounds Artrage will be of
great use to any scrapbooker who chooses to sometimes create their own
elements and backgrounds.
Do I recommend this programme – absolutely – it’s fun,
clever, easy to use and whats more its inexpensive!!!
You can download a free version ( has limited tools and no layer support)
or you can download the full version for just $25 from http://www.artrage.com. Version 2.5 is now available.
© 2006 Lauren Bavin
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