I want to paint my work but I do not know what program, write your own.

OpenCanvas 1.1. It's free, but limited and sometimes glitchy. I've used it for years and still love it though.

Photoshop CC. Not free, and has a huge selection of options and brushes, and even more you can download from tons of places online.

I know people that use SAI and Gimp. Not sure about SAI but Gimp was free last time I checked.

wolftacos said:
OpenCanvas 1.1. It's free, but limited and sometimes glitchy. I've used it for years and still love it though.

Photoshop CC. Not free, and has a huge selection of options and brushes, and even more you can download from tons of places online.

I know people that use SAI and Gimp. Not sure about SAI but Gimp was free last time I checked.

Thanks

MyPaint and Krita (both free).

Probably Krita is what's most recommendable to a newbie, though I think the smoothness and ease of painting in MyPaint is hard to beat.

i use paint tool sai

wolftacos said:
I know people that use SAI and Gimp. Not sure about SAI but Gimp was free last time I checked.

Don't use GIMP.

I've used GIMP many times over the years and I've honestly never had a good experience with it. The last time I was using it I was trying to do some basic photo editing--balance colors, crop and resize... nothing fancy, it was just for an amazon review. It crashed. It kept crashing. Soomewhere on one of those steps... it couldn't. I really don't recomend GIMP.

AS for what DO use.. I don't know! I"m trying to figure that out myself.

An top of what others have used... I've got Medibang paint and fire alpaca installed. a lot of people speak very fondly of clip paint studio... but it's apay program--though it has a limited trial!

(as a note on art programs with trials... make sure you can save before you invest a lot of time into a piece of artwork. I've noticed one or two programs that don't really mention "oh, wait you can't save!" until you try to save.. which is pretty underhanded, but then, maybe I jsut didn't read closely enough.

SnowWolf said:
Don't use GIMP.

I've used GIMP many times over the years and I've honestly never had a good experience with it. The last time I was using it I was trying to do some basic photo editing--balance colors, crop and resize... nothing fancy, it was just for an amazon review. It crashed. It kept crashing. Soomewhere on one of those steps... it couldn't. I really don't recomend GIMP.

That's... really weird. I only ever use GIMP and it works pretty great. Never crashed for me, either. You must have had some corrupted files or something.

GIMP supports "color to alpha" and "Color behind" (though I like to instead throw a white layer below and color either on that or between them), and you can always once again go over your lines to thicken them up. When performing touchups to artwork, that's typically what you're going to need, but if you've got a graphical tablet, GIMP also supports pressure sensitivity.

Paint Tool SAI. It has a stupid-simple UI and contains only what I need instead of a bunch of useless garbage I don't need or use. SAI 2.0 has a few more nice things that 1.2 didn't have, which is nice. For the few things I do need that SAI doesn't offer I just use Photoshop, since it's useful for scans or certain filters.

Artrage is kind of neat if you like emulating traditional media, but I don't use it much.

I've used or tried several other programs but they always seemed to have problems:
-GIMP always crashed at the initial splashscreen, thus unusable
-Krita updates have been entirely unusable at times
-Corel Painter would crash after a few minutes of use
-Photoshop is a fat resource pig (despite still using it occasionally)
-Paint.NET has weird issues with text and curves tools for some reason

Haven't tried Clip Studio Paint but I've heard it's good.

I use Paint.NET but I'm starting to want to try something new

SnowWolf said:
Don't use GIMP.

I've used GIMP many times over the years and I've honestly never had a good experience with it. The last time I was using it I was trying to do some basic photo editing--balance colors, crop and resize... nothing fancy, it was just for an amazon review. It crashed. It kept crashing. Soomewhere on one of those steps... it couldn't. I really don't recomend GIMP.

Under Windows there are bunch of issues like this, latest issue I got was that every time I tried to open it, it tried to cache fonts from place that didn't exsist for two minutes. Was able to fix that by simply removing that path. If you use Linux there are rarely this severe issues. Usually deleting .gimp folder on your userprofile and doing clean reinstall fixes most issues.

My problem is that I have been using Gimp from the time that I still was only using Linux to do everything ten years ago and it still does everything I need to do, so it's simply faster and easier for me to just use it instead of training to use new software. I do remember trying Krita to check one gif animation file and I simply couldn't find how to do what I wanted to do, what I could've done in seconds already with gimp.

As it still is one of the free software, it's always worth a try, similar to Krita which is updating constantly and paint.NET. With paid options at least SAI and photoshop CC do have trial periods, but they will demand more commitment with purchare than free alternatives.

Used to draw with Paint in elden days (yeah, i know...), now slowly experimenting with Manga Studio 5/Clip Studio since it isn't as confusing as PS and a number of artists that i like use it too.

Ps. get a draw pad, drawing with mouse is both hard, imprecise and doesn't train your arm.

I use Microsoft Paint to draw my lineart, and PictBear for the coloring. I only have a mouse, tho

Furrin_Gok said:
That's... really weird. I only ever use GIMP and it works pretty great. Never crashed for me, either. You must have had some corrupted files or something.

That IS weird then! I dunno. I was just using some sort of autobalance or something like that (y'know, know, the thing that most decent art programs should have).. It was a really basic like, 2-3 minute "make suitable for posting" that I tried like 4 times before I gave up and downloaded something else. Mighta been corrupt files! ...That said, I've tried it several times over the years and keep running into issues. Been too long to remember most of them, though.

(part of which might have been that I used a pirated copy of photoshop when I was a kid and GIMP always seemed like it was trying to be PSP, but wasn't quite there yet.)

That said, my issue was about a year and a half ago, so who knows--maybe it's been fixed :)

Ratte said:
Haven't tried Clip Studio Paint but I've heard it's good.

What I saw of it (there's a free-no-saves trial) seemed pretty neat. But I've not really tried to draw much yet. My art-hand is rusty and stiff and I want to stick with one program once I get started, at least at first.

NOTE ON GIMP:
It will often freeze while the splash screen is up, particularly on the first run or when brushes/plugins are modified. However it's just querying things in the background and will start up eventually.

Beyond that, I would absolutely *not* recommend gimp to anyone new to digital painting or editing, as it has tons of 'Gotcha's which are things that only appear to stop working correctly because you pushed a button somewhere by accident.

I've been using gimp since 2011-ish and still run into these on just about every project.

However the latest version is pretty stable on both windows and linux.

Mairo said:
My problem is that I have been using Gimp from the time that I still was only using Linux to do everything ten years ago and it still does everything I need to do, so it's simply faster and easier for me to just use it instead of training to use new software. I do remember trying Krita to check one gif animation file and I simply couldn't find how to do what I wanted to do, what I could've done in seconds already with gimp.

I'm also a longtime GIMP user -- even though I use development/git version most of the time, crashes are extremely rare. I'm pretty happy with the usability, too (2.9+, development/git). Biggest recommendation I would make about it is to hide a lot of stuff from the toolbox and access the rest through shortcuts or the Tools menu. And experiment with the dockables (there are a lot of different ones you might want to consider)

Personally my philosophy is to know a selection of tools which are best at what they do, and hook them up.

That's why I don't recommend GIMP for general CG painting; It can do CG painting, but MyPaint and Krita can do it better and with less complexity.

For touchups, coloring, or complex animations, yeah, GIMP (with GMIC and GIMP-GAP). Maybe also Gifsicle.
For vectors, Inkscape (Krita and MyPaint both facilitate use of an external vector editor for vector layers, FWIW)
For pixel art (inc.animated, tiles,..) or design, Grafx2 with DB_Toolbox; or GIMP 2.9+, since it has some nice indexpainting stuff -- you can airbrush/clone, use fuzzy brushes, etc on indexed images.
For modelling, Blender.

It is a bit complex juggling the different programs, but this can be reduced (eg. set the keybindings to the same keys; use the search function where available -- Space in Blender, / in GIMP 2.9+)

Mairo said:
Under Windows there are bunch of issues like this, latest issue I got was that every time I tried to open it, it tried to cache fonts from place that didn't exsist for two minutes. Was able to fix that by simply removing that path. If you use Linux there are rarely this severe issues. Usually deleting .gimp folder on your userprofile and doing clean reinstall fixes most issues.

Geeze.

My problem is that I have been using Gimp from the time that I still was only using Linux to do everything ten years ago and it still does everything I need to do, so it's simply faster and easier for me to just use it instead of training to use new software. I do remember trying Krita to check one gif animation file and I simply couldn't find how to do what I wanted to do, what I could've done in seconds already with gimp.

Heheh.... wha'ts funny is... I used to do animations in photoshop, then, because of reasons, tried to do it in GIMP one day and jump

post #1263144 post #1162846 post #1221469

Relearning software is pretty damn tricky though-- the problem comes if that tool is ever no longer available... but we're pretty adaptable creatures, when pressed to be. :)