Tweet		ArtRage is packed with natural painting tools and utilities for all levels of artist. Feature Categories Natural Painting Tools Stencils & Rulers Layers & Blend Modes Sketching & Drawing Tools Canvas / Paper User Interface Colors Tracing & Reference Images File Formats, Import & Export Full Feature Comparison: To compare the features of all versions of ArtRage on one page, click here. Natural Painting Tools Get painting without having to learn complex digital tools. ArtRage provides painting tools that behave like real world tools so you can use familiar techniques as you work. The Oil Brush and Paint Roller place strokes of paint which can be blended with other colors under the brush. The Paint Tube lays down blobs or stripes of thick paint that can be spread out with the Palette Knife. The Airbrush sprays a fine mist of paint to create subtle tints without affecting the texture of your brush strokes. ArtRage tracks more than just the color of the paint on your canvas. The application understands the thickness of the paint, how wet it is, and how reflective your metallic paint is. This allows the tools to work more like real tools than digital tools. ArtRage knows how much paint is on your canvas so as you smear thick oils to flatten and spread them they thin down until they won't spread any more. When thick paints meet their colors mix together until they dry out, so you can create natural looking blends. The texture of the bristles shows up in the stroke while you paint, but you can smooth it out with a Palette Knife if you want a flat result. Sometimes you want the unpredictable, chaotic look of a stroke made with a dirty brush. ArtRage remembers what paint you have on your brush head, even if you've been mixing on the canvas, so you can turn off automatic cleaning and have your brush head remain dirty until you dip it in the handy Water Glass. Sketching & Drawing Tools Take advantage of the texture of your canvas with freehand sketching and precise drawing tools. The Pencil Tool has adjustable softeness so you can do everything from subtle shading that picks up the paper grain, to bold line work. The Chalk and Crayon tools are great for block coloring. The Felt Pen lets you work with soft tipped ink pens from markers to artistic highlighters that interact with color already on the canvas. The Glitter Tube lets you sprinkle sparkly, metallic particles over your image with a variety of settings to adjust the final result. This tool is great for greeting cards and other art projects. Tool settings allow control over the softness of the lead in the Pencil, the wetness of the Felt Pen tip, and more properties that let you simulate a wide range of different sketching styles and tools. Colors How you pick colors is central to the process of painting and the best way to do it can vary from person to person, or even painting to painting. Do you blend color on the canvas and sample it, do you use an artistic color picker, or do you store samples of your favorites for later use? The Color Picker supports variants of HLS and RGB color picking in its corner-wheel configuration. If you prefer to work with color on the canvas you can place down different blobs of paint with the Paint Tube and blend them with the Palette Knife for sampling as you need them later. Store Color Samples for your favorite colors, and create Custom Color Pickers for when you have a set of colors you want to work with. Add Metallic Tinting to your pigments to add some reflectivity to the pigment. Metallic paint blends smoothly in to non metallic paint. Stencils & Rulers Rather than requiring you to change tool modes or define selected areas to create straight lines and masks, ArtRage gives you a freeform, flexible Stencil and Ruler system that lets you work precisely using any tool, without needing to change settings. With a Ruler on the canvas, you can paint a freehand stroke that snaps to the edge as soon as you get close, then you can draw along the edge as if you were using a real ruler, and away from it back in to a freehand stroke without lifting the stylus. Any shape can be turned in to a Ruler, so you can create crisp curved edges or geometric rulers that give you a precision edge to draw against. Rulers are physical objects on your canvas so you can put down as many as you like and they work together. Do perspective construction or create complex shapes by placing multiple items then drawing along their edges. Stencils work like plastic slates that prevent paint passing through to the canvas. Like Rulers, Stencils work together so you can lay down as many as you like for a wider range of effects. Canvas / Paper The type of surface you paint on can add a lot to the final feel of a piece of art. ArtRage lets you define the properties of your canvas including texture and color to create a huge range of different surfaces. Choose from a range of Canvas Presets, store your own, or just tweak properties on the fly. Personalising your Canvas can turn it from a blank background window in to an integral part of the artwork. Canvas Properties such as texture and roughness exist independent of any paint you have applied. Change the Canvas underneath your artwork at any point and new paint strokes will react to the changes. While you paint, you'll see your Canvas in the window beneath, it's not just applied as a post process to the image. Canvas Texture can be removed and the surface made transparent for exporting images with transparency masks. Tracing & Reference Images If you want to use an existing photo as a guide while painting, there are a couple of ways ArtRage can let you import them to assist with your work. Import photos as Tracing Images. Images are overlaid on to the canvas and remain visible while you paint. Automatic Color Selection makes ArtRage sample color for you from the Tracing Image as you paint so that you can focus on your brush work. This is great for beginners who are just getting used to painting. Import photos as Reference Images that are pinned to your canvas to be visible while you work. Scale, rotate and position the Reference Image, and zoom in to its contents to get the perfect area for reference while you're painting. Layers & Blend Modes ArtRage supports industry standard Layers and Layer Groups, transparent overlays that allow you to paint in to your image without damaging paint that was previously applied. Using Layers, you can paint elements of your image and edit them independently of other elements, allowing you to make changes without disturbing the rest of your work. Add as many Layers and Layer Groups as you like to your painting. Layer controls include Opacity Adjustment and a visibility toggle, and Layer contents can be scaled, rotated, and moved independently. ArtRage supports Photoshop standard Blend Modes that change the way paint interacts with items beneath. User Interface The Interface is designed to let you focus on your creativity and get out of the way while you work so that you can spend your time painting rather than navigating panels. Important functionality such as tool and color selection appears in corner based roundels that can be retracted to give you more space if required. Other functions such as tool settings, layers, and tracing options are kept in sliding panels attached to the side of the window that can be retracted if they are not being used. The interface is organised to maximize the space you have for painting, without requiring you to hunt for functions when you need them. While you paint, interface elements get out of the way as the brush approaches so that you can keep painting underneath panels without having to stop and hide them before continuing. If you prefer a completely blank canvas, a right click dismisses the entire interface and you can paint on a clear screen. Shortcuts for sizing the brush and picking colors directly on the canvas mean you don't need to see any interface at all if you're focused on painting. If you have a Multitouch screen you can use gestures to control the interface and the canvas, making it easy to move objects such as Stencils and Panels around. File Formats, Import & Export In order to maintain paint volume, wetness, and other features unique to the application, ArtRage uses its own file format to store your paintings. However, you can import and export a number of different formats if you want to work with images from other applications, or export copies of your paintings to display. Import and Export standard image formats including PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, and others depending on your operating system. Import and export Photoshop PSD format files, maintaining your Layer and Group structures and Blend Modes as you pass information between the two applications.