Free Drawing Software

Review of Useful Drawing Programs

Did you know that I'm using a free drawing software to create dozens of tutorials on this website? And that you too can use them without much of practice to produce stunning digital artworks in no time? Well... let me share with you some of my personal experience using free drawing programs and how to get them as well, for free!

Vector Drawing

If you are new to the concept of 'vector drawing' - it simply means that you draw on the computer by creating various shapes (like most of the examples in my cartoon animals category). Each of these shape will have two components: the outline- called "Stroke" and the inner space - called "Fill". For more details check out Vector Graphic article from Wikipedia.

Ok, back to review - the first free drawing software I suggest you to have a look at is a program called InkScape - an Open Source vector graphics editor. Here is what I like about this drawing program:

Its super light and fast - I often run 5 more programs while using this software, with my Toshiba Satellite laptop bought from 2006.
The interface is simple, clean and easy to navigate. It also displays help messages right on the bottom bar whenever you hover the mouse over some drawing tools.
It has visually illustrated guide tutorials - which makes learning this drawing software really a breeze, especially for those people like myself - I remember pictures and images better than words or numbers.

The are only two drawbacks from my experience using InkScape:

It does not support the universal ESP format for vector graphics. It can only save on its own vector format file or export to PNG files - a bit of a hassle.
It can freeze up at times and Bang!!! - you loose all of your work... Although this does not happen very often, I find a bit annoying having to save very regularly.

With that said, I still think InkScape is one of the best free drawing software available online, so if you haven't tried it yet, be sure to have a check.

Free Hand Drawing

With this kind of drawing I have not used anything else but Photoshop so far and am very happy to keep using it. You must be thinking that I am joking for mentioning Photoshop in this review of free drawing programs ...well, it is actually possible to get your hands on Photoshop programs for free! It may just not be the latest new release you've seen online, of course.

So how to get free photoshop? Here is my little trick: have you heard of P2P network before? basically what it means is that you can share and download files with other users online, through a server site.

What I am talking about here, is go to this site called mininova.org and try the search for free drawing software, in this particular case - "Photoshop CS3" as an example. What you'll find are listings of files - called "torrents" which are uploaded by other users online. Once you download this torrent and a program to run it in (example: Utorrent) you can start to download the software.

It could take anywhere from few minutes to few hours, depending on your connection and the number of people who are actively sharing this particular drawing software that you're trying to download, so be patient.

BUT BE WARNED: some people will try to spread virus or spam by uploading them as torrents and saying they are free drawing software!

So to make sure you successfully get your hand on fully running and virus-spyware free Photoshop, here are couple of things you need to know:

Carefully read the description, make sure its what you want
Look for feedback by other users, see under "Comments" tab
The listing should say it's a fully working program, or has "crack file"
The higher the "Seed" number the faster to download
Be sure it's free of malicious software before you install it - check with your anti-virus program first.

So that's it for my review of good drawing programs online. So far there only two of them, but they are what I have actually used myself, so I can honestly speak from personal experience. Hope you find them useful and above all, don't forget to practice your drawing skills!