Digital painting with mobility

Written by Roshi

How to carry a graphical editor in your USB flash drive

Gone are the days when painters had to carry paints, canvases, tripods, easels, and different sets of brushes outdoors for painting. Now you can witness a new generation of artists making sketches and paintings on their mini-notebooks. In today’s hi-tech world, painting has also become mobile. I love to paint nature and enjoy carrying all my painting tools in my mini-notebook while travelling. With Artweaver, you can hop into the bandwagon too.  

I love to play with images on Adobe Photoshop, but don’t have it installed in my mini-notebook. I don’t really miss it as I can carry a Photoshop equivalent in my pen drive. Artweaver is simple software that allows you to do creative painting with simulated tools and effects to create artistic but natural images.

It is a free graphical image editor and a digital painting program for Windows powered systems. It has flashy brushes and cool artistic effects to turn your work into a masterpiece. It can easily be accommodated in your pen drive so that you don’t need to sacrifice your mini-notebook’s resources.

Artweaver was developed by Boris Eyrich and you can download the portable version from here. The zip folder is 11.2MB and can be extracted directly to the flash drive. Now you are ready to run Artweaver from your pen drive.

Artweaver has a simple and easy to learn interface. It has a main window where editing is done along with a properties bar on the top. Palettes include tools palette, brush palette, information palette, color palette and object palette arranged in the main interface. It also supports a wide range of image formats such as AWD (Artweaver), BMP, RLE, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD.

The tools palette has a lot of selection tools such as rectangular and elliptical selection tools, freehand, polygonal lasso, and magic wand tools. Tool palette also has tools for different shapes along with some basic tools such as eraser, paint bucket, stamp, crop and move tools.

But the awesome collection of artistic brushes in Artweaver impressed me the most. It not only has the common brushes like standard brush, cloning brush and the airbrush, but also has a complete set of artistic brushes such as acrylics, artistic, calligraphy, charcoal, oil pastels, distortion, chalk, felt pen, and impasto. 

It also supports an impressive set of effects such as render, distort, sharpen, blur, texture, and many more to enhance the overall look of images. You can work on different layers and can modify opacity, grains, bleed, jitter and angle of the images. It also supports different languages. There are additional plug-ins to enhance the features. Artweaver also recommends the use of pen tablet to give you a more natural feel of painting.

With Artweaver in my USB flash drive, painting has really become mobile! I can pursue my dream of painting nature outdoors in my mini-notebook. To prove this, I have an impressive collection of sceneries from my recent trip to Nandi Hills.

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