Artweaver

Artweaver is a free digital painting software for Windows. It has been around for about a year and is currently in version 0.5.

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Artweaver is one of the best available alternative for Microsoft Paint, as it offers more brush control as well as layering capability, great for those who like to paint separate and manageable elements. The interface shares much similarities with Photoshop, especially the Tools, Preview, Layers and Color palette. The Brush control window somehow offers much more control compared to Photoshop. Even the layer blending mode also matches Photoshop capabilities, if not better.

Artweaver has its own layer-enabled file format, Artweaver Document (*.awd) and it also can handle Photoshop’s *.psd files well without a glitch. However, opening a large (1024×768) PSD file seem to take a long time as if opening it on Photoshop itself, despite this program’s small footprint (approx. 25 MB when installed). Upon creating 10 layers, it only occupies roughly 70 MB of system memory, compared to 150 MB required when opening the same file using Photoshop CS4. The software didn’t crash during the test although there seems to be some minor bugs that preventing the document window to be resized once in a while.

Artweaver is truly a painter tools since it offers nothing more but a full set of brushes to meddle with. There is no path/pen tool to be expected; a common disability often found in free graphic software or rather a mistake that should have not been committed by any free graphic software developer. It is quite a shame for such good graphic software does not have this tool but given the great effects achievable using the brushes alone, any artist have to bear with this unavailability.

Overall, Artweaver is good though it might be better if the developer could incorporate the path/pen tool. It works great for those who have graphic tablets like those of Cintiq or Wacom. For those who only have the mouse would find it hard though.

Get Artweaver here:
http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?downloads_en