SmoothDraw

SmoothDraw is a free painting and drawing program that delivers features and quality that we’d only expect to find in something we’d have to pay for, and we think that anyone who likes to create digital art should check it out.

The program’s interface is intuitive, with toolbars down the left side and across the top. SmoothDraw comes with a wide variety of tools, including various pencils, pens, airbrushes, paintbrushes, hatch brushes and so on. There are also grass and star stamps and an image hose, all of which are a lot of fun to use. Users can adjust the brush size and ink flow for each brush, and there are also settings for tablet pressure and hardness. Cloning and retouching tools, important parts of any image-editing arsenal, are present as well, and layering capabilities let users create complex images. Unfortunately, the program doesn’t have a Help file, which would have been useful for those who don’t have much experience with digital art. But even users who haven’t tried anything more sophisticated than Microsoft Paint will have fun experimenting with SmoothDraw. Overall, we think that SmoothDraw is a great choice for users of all abilities; it’s accessible enough that beginners can use it, but it packs enough advanced features to be useful to serious artists.

SmoothDraw installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls cleanly. We recommend this program to all users.