Review
Open canvas lets you draw and paint with tools that emulate real drawing materials. Choose a material from the brush library, pick a color and start painting. If you ever worked with an image editor like Photoshop or Paintshop pro before, the interface will be very familiar to you. Although basic image editing options are provided for, painting and drawing is what Open Canvas is all about.
If you are really serious about drawing on the computer and want to get the most out of software like this, it is advisable to invest in a decent drawing tablet like a Wacom. Open canvas recognizes the pressure and speed of your stylus and will change the character of your brushstroke accordingly.
OpenCanvas comes with a big library of brushes, conveniently named after the real life materials they are mimicking. Furthermore, if you cannot find what you are looking for, you can experiment with different parameters for your brushes and build your own library of custom brushes.
One of the advantages of using software to draw, in comparison to working on paper or canvas, is that you can work in layers. This way you can paint over a background without destroying it. The layer system in openCAnvas looks like the one in previous versions of Photoshop. You get all the different blending modes, opacity and the possibility to move or lock layers. You can use masks, but they are arranged under a different tab, and organizing your layers in layer maps is not supported.
One unique feature of Open Canvas, which I haven’t seen in any other painting software, is the ability to record the process of drawing. When you record your progress the software keeps track of every brush stroke and color change you make. Once you are finished, you can see a replay of the entire drawing process. It is fun to see the computer redraw your creation once more, but the real value of this feature will be revealed when you go to the on-line community of openCanvas. Here thousands of users share their drawings, which you can download for free and then play in your copy of Open Canvas to see the painting evolve from start to finish. The community is filled with talented artists; and seeing how other people draw is a great learning experience. Most of the drawings posted here are manga (Japanese comics), but you can find beautiful examples of other styles as well.
Supported file formats are JPG, BMP, PNG, Photoshop PSD and openCanvas own .oci format. A limited choice, but not really a problem, because all these formats except openCanvas's own are widely supported, and you should have no problem getting your drawings in or out of the software.
This paint package is easy to use, fully featured and great value for the money! |
