Welcome back! If you didn’t come here from my previous video on what’s inside a digital art app, go check that out! In that I showed you Procreate and areas of all art apps you’ll find, and now I want to show a bunch more. So without further ado…
Krita! A free app for PCs, this program has been around for a while, is actively developed, and has some clever features abound. Given its pricetag, if you’re planning on drawing on anything other than an iPad (including PCs, Macs, Linux, Android tablets, and more), you risk nothing trying this one out. Look! It has all of the stuff on the screen that I was talking about last time. It’s pretty powerful, but I do have a couple of things to caution you about: its flexible interface can lead to things getting a bit confusing. This will be particularly noticeable when we start to talk about blending modes and brush customization. There’s just everything, everywhere, all at once. (Wait.) The other is that it has issues with PSD, or Photoshop, files. But I don’t care about Photoshop! Yeah, but… every art app can import and export PSD, and it’s kinda important to have that to be able to switch between apps. For those about to powerslide into the comment section, (terrible vocalized car brake noises) Krita does not handle clip masks correctly with this format, and sure it’s because it does things differently, but the matter remains that PSDs will open and save broken and in need of repair. Anyway, Krita is still a fantastic app, just be aware that you might have to do a bit more in some areas than my other recommendations here. I know tons of great artists that use it happily and it’s awesome to have a powerful community-built app right here.
Onwards! PaintTool SAI 2 is a PC app that looks a bit more “basic” but I’ve totally fallen in love with it. It’s currently about $35 US after currency conversion, and while version 2 has been in beta for years, it’s a stellar piece of software that’s actively updated. I love its interface because it seems to have the exact amount of stuff you need on-screen and not much more. And yep: all of the stuff we’ll be getting into. My only gripe? No dark mode yet. Otherwise, it’s snappy, has a brush engine that’s just really fun and nice out of the box, and gets you from zero to paint pretty dang quickly.
FireAlpaca is something in between Krita and PaintTool SAI. It’s another PC and Mac app that’s got a little more going on, but what’s presented generally feels well thought-out. It has two editions: a free version, which is fine for most of what we’ll talk about, and a paid version, which adds dark mode, masks, liquify, and some other goodies. This one seems to be gaining in popularity, and for good reason. It just feels nice and works well.
That’s most of my recommended list, along with Procreate from my past video. Let’s talk about a few more that I don’t typically recommend, and then we’ll wrap this up.
Elephant in the room: Photoshop! This Adobe product is the industry standard because it did most things first, it’s what schools have taught, and it’s really hard to break that momentum. Since then, many other art apps have done what Photoshop does, better in some ways, but Photoshop remains the behemoth. But don’t think you need to pay that fee now: if you learn any art app you’ll be able to pick up Photoshop, no problem, if you need to later. I probably don’t need to go into the weeds of why I’m not recommending this one,but I will comment that if it takes the US Justice Department to tell your company that your subscription is so terrible that it might be illegal… maybe you’re not the good ones.
Coming out of left field from …also Adobe, is Fresco, on PC and iPad. I don’t really know the origins of this one, but it feels like some team at Adobe saw Procreate and wanted to try their own. Honestly, I’m rather torn about it. Because it’s actually pretty good. The out-of-the-box painting tools on the iPad version are just so… so nice. And it’s… free? There’s an optional $10 per year subscription that lets you have custom brushes. (So uh, little correction: apparently the subscription is gone and this is just free as of like… last week? So… neat I guess. The rest of my points remain though.) Not per month, per year. That seems fine? But the thing that ruins this for me: it only saves to Creative Cloud. You can export out of that to your own files, but there is no option to have art you create not save to Creative Cloud, a service that has limited storage, run by a company with a pattern of hostile changes to their pricing and terms of service.
One more: Clip Studio Paint. Aaaah, for a while I liked this one. Fantastic UI and pretty fluid controls. But a couple years back they somehow managed to come up with a licensing scheme that is somehow more confusing than Adobe’s offerings. Depending on your perspective, you can buy this app three or four different kinds of ways, with it being subscription-only for iPads and Android tablets. And if you choose to buy a “keep forever” copy, you don’t get any updates unless you also buy an “update pass”, and when that expires your copy time-travels back to the last full version that you paid for? If you’ve already got a copy of this and want to try it, it’s great, but I have a hard time recommending it anymore because of how complicated it is to just buy it. (who thought this was fine)
Up next, we’ll talk about hardware! Tablets, pens, …those… two things! They can vary a lot and I’ve got a lot to say. Until then, try out some more exercises with your art app! Practice some of the same stuff from the last video, and I also want you to try playing with any feature that you haven’t tried yet. See if you can figure out how some of those mystery buttons work, at least one of them. Find something cool, or have another art app to talk about? Let’s hear in the comments! And if you know some of this stuff already, don’t feel like you need to wait on me: the best way to learn is by trying it out, and when I catch up to you, you might pick up a couple more things too. See you then.
| Production Info | |
|---|---|
| Music | MEOD - Soft Sand |
| VRChat World | Sea Breeze by WispyWoo |
| VRChat Avatar | Vulper by Royalty, Meaty, and Reval |