The best 6 most paid and popular graphic design drawing

Digital Art consists of drawing on the computer, with a Graphics Tablet normally (also called a digitizing tablet), using specific drawing programs to draw on the computer, such as Photoshop, Krita, Corel, etc.

A drawing software can make your work much easier and faster than traditional pencil and paper drawing. Therefore, today I have decided to bring you these programs to draw.

Drawing software like Artrage, PaintTool Sai, and Photoshop let you do things like quick edit and undo mistakes with the simple click of a mouse.

Me c abo buy a graphics tablet XP-Pen, the graphic display XP-12 Pro Artist Pen , and I began to look for programs that can use this tablet design. There are a few paid and as many free programs to draw with a tablet.

Not only will you be able to use a graphic tablet for photographic or drawing retouching programs, you can also use it as a substitute for the mouse.

Therefore, I have done a little research to bring you a list of the most used programs for drawing, coloring and illustrating. Remember that if you use a graphic tablet you will get better results with less time.

However, each program has a specific niche, and it is only a matter of the user downloading them and checking for himself which of them best suits his requirements and level of knowledge.

2 Free Alternative Programs for digital drawing

And these are all the free programs that I have been able to find as good alternatives to paid programs. I recommend that you install the one that best suits you (each one draws digitally in a different way) and that you use a graphic tablet.

Do not think that because they are free they are cheap, these programs are very powerful and many people use them to draw on the computer or for graphic design.

1. GIMP - bitmap editor, free

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It has some similarities to Photoshop manga drawing software, which means it is great for painting and drawing.

It is a very versatile software since thanks to the customization options and the plugins we will be able to manipulate photographs to make advanced corrections to make artistic and vector drawings and much more. With GIMP the possibilities are endless.

You can create other “floating” packaging tools that you can later group, such as layers, brushes, color channels, paths, and history. This is extremely useful if you want to streamline your editing and layout process.

But the Toolbox is where your artistic arsenal really shines, giving you tools to paint, pencil, smudge, sharpen, clone, erase, and more. There's even a Paths tool for basic vector-based line creation, if you don't want to install a secondary program based on them. Do you want visual effects? You will have access to a large library. GIMP even supports community-created plugins.

Among the functions that we can find in GIMP is a wide collection of drawing tools such as brushes of all kinds, the possibility of making color gradients or having an infinite canvas, only limited by the amount of memory available on your computer. The downside of GIMP is that its interface can be a bit impressive at first, since it offers many options, but it is quite intuitive.

Some GIMP features include:

Create custom brushes and patterns.

Transform tools to rotate, scale and flip your drawings and images.

Common selection tools such as ellipse, rectangular and free selection.

It works on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and is compatible with graphics tablets, recognizes pressure sensitivity, stroke speed, etc.

Another great feature of GIMP is the ability to add plugins to further extend its features.

2. Autodesk SketchBook - a good digital illustration app

Autodesk SketchBook is perhaps the best drawing program available on the market, as it offers a perfect balance between ease of use and tools, allowing the draftsman to concentrate only on what he is doing.

SketchBook is a more compact digital drawing program than Corel Painter or Photoshop, but extremely versatile and powerful.

Many designers and digital artists say that SketchBook is the easiest digital drawing program to use.

Available for Windows 10, Autodesk SketchBook is free and offers a great number of effects, filters and tools such as warping, advanced perspective guides, synthetic brush types, and mixers, embedding images to a drawing, dynamic gradient fill, FlipBook animation, size custom canvas sizes up to 64 mpx, Copic color library, and the ability to create and customize our own brushes, just like other drawing tools like Gimp do. It also includes various types of pencil, marker, airbrush, eraser, pen, marker, bristle brush, loop, allows you to work up to 3 layers and many other tools.

Apart from all these great features, it offers an excellent user interface, very well thought out and designed, where the most important thing is the drawing that the creator is doing. It should be noted that the drawing made with the application can be exported in PSD format (the Photoshop format) keeping all the layers intact, an advantage that many will appreciate.

4 paid drawing and painting programs

1. photoshop - King of the market

Photoshop is the most professional program, since it is an extremely powerful, comprehensive tool and is widely used.

It is from the Adobe company and works with bitmaps. It is used mainly for editing, retouching photographs and as a digital painting canvas. It is excellent at making selections in our images. It allows the use of a wide variety of brushes, textures, filters, color modifiers, layer styles ... and it has an infinity of plugins that can be very useful. For something it is known as the best software of this style on the current market.

In photoshop you can do almost everything. For this reason it is quite a heavy program and something difficult to learn if you do not have prior knowledge of this type of professional software. However, thanks to its versatility and power, it is highly recommended to spend a few hours learning it. Also, if your intention is to dedicate yourself professionally to illustration and you want to work in a company, it is almost certain that this program will be one of the requirements to access the position.

Photoshop is an image editing application that can be used to paint on the computer and make digital illustration, for photo retouching, to create graphics of all kinds.

2. Corel Painter - Pure digital painting

Corel Painter is a very strong rival to Photoshop. Like Photoshop, it is a very complete program with which you can create professional-level digital images.

It differs from Photoshop in a number of ways, the interface is a bit different, and the brushes use a bit different technology as well. It is difficult to say which is better of the two.

Corel Painter is a program focused on producing digital painting. Its results perfectly emulate the acrylic or watercolor paints that we can make on a canvas. We can also create canvases (layers) based on watercolor or liquid ink to give more realism. It is quite heavy software and it is convenient to have a powerful computer to be able to work properly and avoid it from hanging.

In theory Corel Painter gives a more organic feeling when painting, as better simulating the texture of real brushes, while in Photoshop it is more comfortable for image manipulation. Again, the differences are small and depends on the taste of each artist.

3.Paint Tool SAI - A program for digital painting and drawing

Paint Tool SAI is a bitmap graphics editing program that is characterized by its simplicity but at the same time allows to obtain very good results.

It's powerful without being as complex as Photoshop. That is why Paint Tool SAI is often used to draw on the computer by artists who are just starting out and do not want to get involved with excessive complexity.

The really good thing about SAI is its ease of learning, its simple interface and its lightness. It is a program that focuses exclusively on drawing and painting. Allows you to add textures to paintings to achieve an effect of watercolor, tempera or any other traditional technique. Also, you can rotate the canvas by pressing just one key.

This allows you to make single-stroke lines that look good, without that shaky hand movement. This makes it a great program for inking.

Many people use Paint Tool SAI to draw and paint on the computer, and then use Photoshop to put the finishing touches on the image, such as advanced filters and effects.

4. Clip Studio Paint - For comic and manga lovers

Clip Studio Paint PRO is the new improved version of this very popular program for digital illustration and drawing manga. It is a very complete program to draw digitally and it is not only for drawing Manga on the computer, but it is also valid for drawing comics of any type or digital illustration in general.

Clip Studio Paint PRO is a good intermediate point between the complexity of Photoshop and other more basic programs like Paint Tool SAI.

If what you really like to do is draw comics or manga, this should be your instrument. It has a tool to easily create personalized vignettes, speech bubbles, perspective rulers, rulers to draw lines of effect that express speed or moods ... You can also create plots and typical comic motifs. It has a function to create symmetries (draw on one side of the canvas and automatically draw on the other side as if it were a mirror). Allows you to manage and modify several comic pages at the same time.

Something that draws the attention of this program is the library of poses of a 3D model, which can modify its appearance (weight, body proportions ...). This is useful for reference in your characters.

If you use an iPad to draw digitally or are thinking of buying one, there is a version of Clip Studio Paint for iPad. The interface changes a bit from the computer, but is otherwise very similar to the computer version. And it allows you to design and draw with iPad anywhere, which is a huge plus.