Product Reviews

Starting with MacPaint, there's been no shortage of Mac applications that emulate real-world painting and drawing materials. Corel Painter is the application that most readily comes to mind when illustration in oil on canvas is required - but ArtRage 2.5, a $25 application that punches well above its weight, may soon change that.

The simplicity of the ArtRage interface belies the application's sophistication. If it looks vaguely familiar, the reason is that the developers are Andy Bearsley and Matt Fox-Wilson, formerly of MetaCreations, which developed Painter, Bryce, Kai's Power Tools and a host of other programs.

Unusually for a graphics application, the workspace is almost entirely given over to the canvas, with palettes and toolboxes kept to a minimum. A Tool Picker panel occupies a quadrant in the bottom-left corner. A similarly shaped Colour Picker occupies the bottom-right, while the Menubar, Toolbox and Tool Settings and Layers panels hug the canvas sides. Grab handles allow you to minimise any panel or you can press the tab key to remove them all and work on a full-screen canvas.

ArtRage's tools are aimed squarely at painters and illustrators, and are mostly used freehand so a graphics tablet is a must, though the brushes, markers, pencils, chalks, crayons and other media can be used with

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a mouse and manually adjusted for size, pressure and tilt. Tools are firmly rooted in the drawing tradition, so you won't find any special-effects filters. But there are plenty of rulers and stencils that can be used to guide or mask areas of the canvas while you paint.

Brushes pick up wet paint already on the canvas, mixing and spreading it around. You can choose to have brushes automatically clean themselves or you can do it as and when you like via a water glass icon.

Another useful feature is the ability to pin reference material to the canvas, which can then be colour-sampled. Taking this a stage further, images can be imported to a base layer and traced using any of the brushes, which automatically pick up colour from the trace layer. For good measure ArtRage has excellent layer features too.

Layers can be grouped and there's support for layered Photoshop files. Layer-blend modes, like many of the program's other features, bear little resemblance to their Photoshop equivalents because they are focused on useful paint effects rather than pixel manipulation. There are four blend modes that control interaction of overlaid paint colours and an additional four bump-blend modes that affect overlying paint textures.

There are some things that could be improved. Though you can import custom stencils and make a stencil from a layer, an easier way of selecting and masking irregular areas would be welcome. And while ArtRage has ample keyboard shortcuts, synchronising some of the more obvious ones, like panning and zooming with their Photoshop equivalents, would be nice.

But these are minor niggles in a program that gets the balance between ease of use and sophistication just about spot-on. This and the $25 price tag make it perfectly suited for drawing and illustration across the skills spectrum - for kids, in all sectors of education and for professional illustration.