Ambient Design ArtRage 2.0 review

ArtRage is a simple painting application that's easy to pick up and start playing with.

At the heart of this simplicity lies ArtRage's excellent interface. It forgoes standard windows conventions in favour of a clean, plain and suspiciously Mac-like appearance. Your canvas covers the whole screen, so there are no windows to resize, shape or scroll, and the tool, layer and colour palettes slide away when you get too close. Rather than bringing up a context menu, right-clicking simply enters full-screen editing mode, while the left-click is reserved for painting.

You can make your mark with all the usual implements: pencil, crayon, felt-tip pen, roller, airbrush and chalk. Each tool has further appropriate refinements. The pencil, for example, has pressure, softness and tilt-angle parameters and is excellent for quick sketches and line drawing or creating a layout for further work. The most impressive of the tools is the paintbrush. It can deliver everything from a fine fleck of paint to a great, oily dollop, and you have complete control over how much paint you apply, the pressure you use and whether the brush is cleaned after every application.

The tools are well designed, but the real star of ArtRage is the paint itself. Colours blend on the canvas as if you were dabbing your screen with a real paintbrush. Unless instructed not to, the brush will pick up any wet paint from the canvas and gradually combine it with your chosen colour, creating subtle mid-tones that streak and combine like real oil paint. You can also manipulate the paint and other media with the palette knife tool, blending and spreading colour. The effect is stunning.

Despite its dedication to replicating real media, ArtRage has made a concession to modern graphic applications in the use of layers. This means you can create a pencil outline, then paint underneath it, keeping your guidelines visible. You can control the opacity of each layer and the way it interacts with layers above and below. This gives you much greater control over the finished image than you would get from a single canvas.

To get the best from ArtRage it helps to have a stylus input or Tablet PC - there is even a version tailored to Ultra Mobile PCs - but it's not absolutely necessary. Fortunately for us, neither is artistic talent. A handy tracing function lets you paint directly over one of your photos. It can even draw the paint colour from the underlying photo, so you simply have to apply the brush strokes. Alternatively, you can pin a photo to the canvas for reference or to provide inspiration.

There are other applications that do similar things, most notably Sketchbook Pro and Corel Painter X, but none is even close to this price range, and none is so accessible. ArtRage might not be as comprehensive as the other titles mentioned, but its trim interface and ease of use make it an excellent choice for kids and adults that want to give computer painting a try. For the price it's excellent fun.