That said, certain particle brushes have caused it to crash, it's not the quickest of programs, and I find the interface to be a bit cumbersome. New particle brushes have some great uses for concept sketching, general doodling, and very specific purposes. The best for real-media imitation in everything but impasto (which I find to be cumbersome in Painter). Painter 2015: For me, a mixed bag of love and hate. While the brush engine is great, and it does have the ability to do more naturalistic painting, the natural media emulation is not quite as good as the likes of Artrage or Painter, at least so far as out-of-the-box brushes are concerned. Has a good brush engine, great tablet interface with recognized gesture support, and seems to handle palm rejection better than other programs for some strange reason (Maybe in my head?). The smoothing here brings it closer to feeling like a real pencil than any other program I've tried. Manga/Clip Studio 5: Simply the best program I've used for pencil/ink work. If you're not interested in a more real-paint type of mixing, but want smoothing on your brushes, you can get Lazy Nezumi Pro to add smoothing to photoshop, which works quite well (Though still not as well as the smoothing present in Clip studio 5) While it does have the mixer brushes which do this to some extent, they're far too slow for me to use. Photoshop: Great all-arounder, but lacking in the area of real-media emulation and paint mixing. It's also only $50 on Steam (last I checked). Another great thing Artrage has is selection/masking brushes and stencils. If you're willing to spend the time to learn it, it even has a nice custom brush engine similar to that of photoshop, the downside being that it takes a bit more work to get a brush working (These more customized brushes are called stickers, which can be turned into custom brushes via sticker sprays). Easy interface for tablets, particularly with the Artrage Toolbar that someone somewhere on the internet created. Has the best and easiest to use impasto effect I've found yet. They all have benefits in one way or another.ДЄrtrage: Great for more traditional style paintings. Having just made the switch to digital, I've spent the last month and a half trying out (nearly) every single digital painting program I could get my hands on. It really depends on what you want to get out of your digital painting. I am a big fan of what you guys have created. I'll probably rarely if ever draw with my Wacom again, aside from doing final touches in Photoshop. For the kind of work I do, I'd seriously recommend this over a Cintiq. I'm a cartoonist and illustrator, usually working with graphic novels, colouring books, storyboards, logo designs, portrait illustrations, etc. Again, for both of these I wouldn't be surprised if I absent-mindedly changed a setting without realizing it, but if you have any insight, that would be great!Д«ut yeah, I'll definitely add some of my stuff to the Facebook page. I've also never been able to use the chalk tool with the Surface pen.

Being able to just draw with the stylus while using my hands as a tool to move the page and select tools was perfect. For example, recently when I turn palm rejection on, I'm also unable to use my fingers to pan and zoom in/out, although this was working before.

I'm also having a couple of minor issues (which are almost certainly due to user error). I can't really find any great examples of this online, but this might give you an idea. The sound of a big piece of charcoal or pencil crayon scratching away is very pleasing. Hardly a necessary addition, I suppose, but I found it created a nice physical connection to the touchpad.

One thing that was nice was how each tool uses sound effects as you draw to simulate the sound of physical media on the page, based on how hard or fast you are pressing. Recently I also played around with an interesting drawing app from Nintendo for Wii U called Art Academy. Maybe a lasso/select tool, text tools, that sort of thing. Just totally dreaming here, but I think watercolour tools would be great. There's really not much I could think to add.

Lazy nezumi pro with sketchbook pro