I’ve been wanting to switch to digital painting/drawing for a long time now; it’s cleaner, you get lots of undos, and there’s no paper surface to ruin by repeatedly erasing on the same spot. I tried to move into doing traditional-style art digitally years ago with Corel Painter 9. It was a buggy piece of crap that crashed constantly. It had the added bonus of corrupting the file I was working on every time it crashed. Yeah. Have you ever worked on a painting or drawing that had the tendency to periodically burst into flames or fall in on itself like a dying star that’s about to collapse into a black hole? No? Then give Painter a try! You’ll marvel at how quickly and frequently your work is destroyed.

So yeah, no more Painter for me. Recently I started looking for some alternatives to Painter and I found a program called Artrage. It’s pretty decent so far and it only cost me 80 bucks for the pro version. Unfortunately it did crash on me once, taking the file along with it like Painter used to do. That scared me off of it a little but I’ve been using it constantly for the past few weeks with no more problems. It also tends to slow down with larger files and saving can take forever. Despite these issues and a few more, it’s leagues ahead of Painter in the reliability department.

Here’s a work-in-progress (a color version of one of my old pencil drawings):

And another I just started on:

I only have time to work on these for one or two days out of the week, so I have no idea when I’ll be done. I’ll post the results when I finish.