Welcome to Trying Out, a little review thing of mine where I try tons of different painting applications i've managed to dug up in the deeper parts of the interwebs to find anything that I can paint on, it may not include every painting app to exist but I'm still currently adding new ones to my list. At the moment I am only using paint apps that mainly run on Windows but I am also including those that I can emulate inside the windows environment, this will include apps from bygone eras like MultiPaint from PC-98, Linux Exclusives like Dibuja and maybe sometimes, Abandonware like NeoPaint(?).
This whole idea started when medibang; my main drawing app, has decided to keep crashing and bluescreening for me, and their mobile app is riddled with a disgusting amount of ads its basically unuseable online (which is the reason I use it for cloud functions in the first place). Now I am not a professional artist and I am just a fairly experienced aspiring artist so I can ascertain that this review is in the POV of a beginner artist < w >.
This one is a repost from a different website but I wanted to keep all my fanarts here so here is one I did in Medibang, I was supposed to try both Fire Alpaca and Jump Paint but I quickly found out after installing them that they are all the same function-wise and the only difference in them is either the UI or cloud functions and available resources being free or commercial..
Now unto some thoughts, this was the first app I ever spent my time learning to draw digitally, and on the first day I was able to learn the basics, and on the second day I was drawing and having fun with less struggles, the clean and more simple UI you can rearrange at will made it less cluttered and overwhelming, and the addition of a cloud saving function made it so I can both work on my PC and on my phone wherever I go, It was excellent despite the clunky wand tool and correction. The current versions are not as promising though as unlike FireAlpaca, they have decided to lock brushes on a paywall and made it so even just opening a project, saving a project, exporting a project will directly push ads to you on mobile and this made it unbearable, I am also recently experiencing blue-screens when working with a cloud save on pc and that finally put a nail in the coffin and I decided it was time to switch programs.
Now for some important points on what makes it a good app:
9/10 Performance - Ran perfectly in my PC, doesn't take too much ram for every layer, well despite the bluescreens.
9/10 Functionality - All the functions you will ever need are within your mouse's reach, all laid out on the screen and with a lot of different options, filters, and advanced setting that you can tweak to get the feel and result that you want, layering is available and different file formats for importing and exporting, blending modes, rulers are also available. Beware albeit it can support PSD files, it is very limited to exporting and importing PSD files may lead to crashing the app.
8/10 Simplicity - Very straightforward, you can learn the basics in a day. Its a middle ground between being clean and cluttered but you can turn off tabs at will or put them at separate windows which makes it super organizable and less overwhelming to use.
10/10 Pricing - ITS FREE!! Why would I put that lower than it should be ofc its a 10.
System Specs:
Drawing tab: VEIKK A15Pro
Ryzen 3 Pro 2200G with Radeon Vega 8 Graphics
8 GB DDR4 2666MHz BATAK RAM
A Generic A** Samsung 75Hz Monitor @1600x900
256GB SSD with 1TB Hard Drive
Thank you for reading this amateur review, hope you find this wall of text somehow useful < w <, Character in Question is GeminiTay which is a Minecraft Youtuber who is now part of the Hermitcraft team, this is an old lineart I decided to finish. Would I recommend this app for a truly beginning digital artist? Absolutely, not the mobile one though, that can suck my ***.
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