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I am guessing about this belonging here but I was wondering if anyone knows of any free art programs for computers? I am not looking for anything that would require me to do anything illegal obviously but I just was inquiring about anything maybe basic or maybe more than basic but that was free? I mean, you know how open office is a free software program for the general public, just hoping for something that might help me with doing some art on my PC. Obviously outside of the art program that comes with windows. lol I mean unless that works good or something.

Paint.net has a nice and extensive plugin system and I tend to do a lot of texture generation & post-editing in it given its simplicity
Gimp is the blender of the 2D graphics world: powerful and free, but it can be pain to work with given the UI, depending on what you are used to.
Art Weaver's free version doesn't come with the photoshop support, but is essentially designed to be a free alternative. It doesn't have all the bells & whistles, but I find for doing digital art w/ a tablet its very nice. If only it supported auto-switching to the eraser tool with my tablet... (Actually better than I found photoshop itself to be in that regard >.>)

Paint tool Sai and Inkscape are also really good in addition to the ones Avan mentioned.

I don't think Paint Tool Sai is free. Opencanvas 1.1 is still available for free download, however. It's a similar sort of program to Sai quite small.

Many art programs have decent trials, as well. Photoshop has a thirty day trial, as does Illustrator and Painter, if I recall. There's a nifty program called Art Rage that has a free trial, too.

There's GIMP, for a 100% free alternative to Photoshop, but I'm not a fan of it (probably because I've used Photoshop for so long).

Ah yes, Inkscape is a great vector art program.


Open Canvas 1.1 had some issues with my computer, so I switched to Art Weaver.

GIMP has always been a part of my primary toolkit,
I cant say much for others as GIMP and Photoshop are the only two graphics programs that I regularly use.

GIMP’s only real limitation is that you can’t go higher than 8 bit color (8 bits per channel), without modding the source code.
But that’s still more than good enough for most projects.

GIMP website Link

thanks for all the great info.