These wide range of art applications come with their own USP (Unique Selling Point), some excel in vector drawings while some are unbeatable at making illustrations. You can find dedicated designing programs for Photo manipulation, 3D Modelling, Free-hand drawing, and many more in our list of Best Digital Art Apps & Programs (2021) for multiple platforms, including Windows, Mac, Web, and Smartphones.
What Are Digital Art Software?
Digital Art Programs are dedicated utilities designed for artists to work on emerging art forms, in which several traditional painting and drawing techniques are utilized. This includes watercolor painting, hands-free drawing, oil impasto, and so on. Additionally, these tools are equipped with advanced functionalities as well to create flawless and futuristic designs.
Best Digital Art Software For Drawing, Painting, Illustration (2022)
Whatever you are hunting for in the category of drawing, painting, or illustrating, here are the best bunch of options to help you make a suitable choice!
1. Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a household name and all credit goes to its simplicity and effectiveness. The digital art software is undoubtedly one of the most resourceful solutions when it comes to world-class graphic editing and photograph enhancement. Photoshop isn’t purely designed for photos, you can utilize the tool for creating illustrations, do packaging designing, make banners, logos, websites, icons, and a lot more. You can make use of fabulous preloaded templates and plugins for professional-looking output.
COMPATIBILITY: Windows, Mac & iOS
FILE SIZE: 12.8 MB
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Gets a complementary iOS application. Is continuously updated with new features and improvements. Has an impressive library of plugins to add more functionalities to the tool.
2. Corel Painter
Corel Painter brings a perfect blend of tools and features to make both traditional paintings and futuristic designs in one place. Corel Painter is a renowned application used mostly for making Canvas Art, Book Covers, Illustrations, and many more. It even allows you to save your personalized collection of brushes, pencils and presets for applying the same strokes. The digital art program has a unique ‘Movie’ feature that lets you merge multiple drawings and paintings for creating storyboards. Cool, right? Let’s know what makes Corel Painter one of the best digital art software in the market.
COMPATIBILITY: Windows & Mac
FILE SIZE: 1.3 MB
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3. Rebelle 4
Rebelle 4 is a powerful digital painting application that comes with a great package of drawing tools, glamorous effects, and lots of natural painting tools to enhance your artistic skills. For amateur artists, Rebelle 4 offers an Intro Tutorial to help users better understand digital art software. It has an amazing collection of brushes, pencils, ink pens, watercolor paints, acrylic paints, markers, airbrushes, and a powerful eraser. Now, let’s check out what makes Rebelle 4 the best digital art application:
Receives frequent performance updates to optimize the overall workflow. Uses accelerated brush technology for creating compelling graphics. Gives amateur artists to get started with traditional tools with a blank canvas.
COMPATIBILITY: Windows & Mac
FILE SIZE: 149.4 MB
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Has new features frequently added like watercolor diffusion, blend mode for smudge painting, and more? This digital art application allows you to redo the entire process & start all over again in no time. Comes with traditional tools & uses ultra-realistic paint effects such as blurring, diffusion, blending & many more.
4. Krita
Krita is one of the best digital art software designed for artists to create comprehensive and realistic illustrations and artistic drawings with the help of a wide range of drawing and painting tools. The application has a modern-looking black-themed user interface with an extensive feature set available on the main window. With Krita, you get CMYK support, the ability to do HDR Painting, and effects to smudge, add texture, spray, duplicate, deform, and many more.
COMPATIBILITY: Windows, Mac & Linux
FILE SIZE: 115 MB
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5. Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer is a phenomenal choice for intermediate and advanced users to create masterpieces digitally. Using this drawing and illustration software, you get an assortment of tools, such as Pencils, Brushes, Pixel-Editing options, Photo-retouching features, and more. Additionally, this digital art software gives you the ability to do layer manipulation and control alignment, arrange objects, rotate, flip and more.
A completely free, open-source drawing software, equipped with all kinds of drawings & illustration tools. A plethora of customizable brushes you can save and reuse as soon as required. Excellent digital art software for newbies & creative people.
COMPATIBILITY: Windows, Mac & iPad
FILE SIZE: 508 MB
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Significant performance improvements when working with large documents. A multitude of effects to transform your photo and enhance overall appearance. The digital art software comes with a bundle of generous collections of Raster tools to create realistic artwork.
6. Adobe Illustrator
You must already be familiar with this popular & professional vector graphics application to design illustrations, digital graphics and develop compelling web/video/mobile content. Adobe Illustrator is the best digital art software that comes with features like Live distortion, adding 3D effects, symbols, blend shapes & more. Unlike most of the digital art utilities, Adobe Illustrator supports cross-media design. Hence, the layout adapts itself according to the preferences, no matter if it is for printing, publishing digitally, or for proper mobile view. Quite useful, right?
COMPATIBILITY: Windows & Mac
FILE SIZE: 3.1 MB
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Support for cross-media design, useful while printing, publishing, or for mobile development. Ability to collaborate and edit documents on the Cloud. A new feature – Snap to Japanese Glyph is added to this digital art software.
7. CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW is a leading graphics suite used by professional and advanced designers all over the globe. The digital art tool is quite popular in the market for creating compelling logos, advertisement banners, and entire websites. Apart from being an expert in the vector graphics software category, CorelDRAW also excels in Page Layout Programs, so that you can effortlessly design complete stationery such as business cards, logos, letterhead, catalog, and more. Let’s check out some of the major advantages & downsides that comes with this digital art solution (2022).
COMPATIBILITY: Windows, Mac, web, iPad, and other mobile devices
FILE SIZE: 1.9 MB
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8. YouiDraw Drawing
Don’t want to install any additional software on your device? Choose none other than YouiDraw. A phenomenal web application to create gorgeous art around vector graphics. It offers a complete package of essential utilities to turn your imagination into reality. It has a powerful image editor, ready-to-use templates, and the ability to merge and adjust separate components in one place. Additionally, you can utilize the extensive shape library for creating top-notch logos and icons.
Intuitive dashboard for managing, organizing & sharing files on Cloud. True cross-platform experience across Windows, Mac, web, iPad, and more. Powerful vector illustration tools to turn basic stuff into complex masterpieces make it the best digital art software.
COMPATIBILITY: Web | Supports Chrome, Opera Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer & more
FILE SIZE: –
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9. Paint 3D
Get the ability to create, customize, print, or share your drawings, paintings, and illustrations using Paint 3D. It is a suitable choice for beginners, intermediate and advanced users, all thanks to the interface’s straightforwardness and support for a variety of photo editing and doodling features. It even supports popular file formats and the fact that it is an upgraded version of default MS Paint, you can definitely count on the reliability factor, it makes it one of the best digital art software to use in 2022.
Ready-made templates and slides for use. Ideal starter pack for emerging artists who want to get used to digital drawing, painting, and illustration, Free digital art software with all the standard tools, brushes, pencils & more.
COMPATIBILITY: Windows
FILE SIZE: 65.8 MB
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10. ArtWeaver
Get creative with Art Weaver digital art software, which offers amazing compilation tools for drawing and painting. The application is really easy to get started with, you can apply a variety of functionalities in one go. With ArtWeaver, you can customize brushes and save them for later use. Apart from some stability issues, you can utilize the digital art tool in two flavors, such as the Free version and premium program version. You can check out the comparison chart to know the differences between both versions. Some of the major advantages & disadvantages of the tool is listed below:
A great starter pack to inspire beginners and youngsters who incline digital painting. Rejuvenated UI with a modern and intuitive layout. Flawless transition effects, backdrop controls, and canvases.
COMPATIBILITY: Windows
FILE SIZE: 14.6 MB
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Our Personal Favorites: WeTheGeek’s Recommendation
Well, we have covered some of the ‘Super-Hit’ choices in the category of Best Digital Software 2022. Some of them are good for amateur designers and individuals inclined towards creating digital art, while some are comprehensive solutions to create compelling graphics.
Top-notch digital art utility for all ages, including children. Availability of free version, along with an affordable Plus version as compared to other digital art applications. Great collaboration functionalities allow numerous people to work on the same artwork at the same time.
Photoshop is a neat designing solution with tons of functionalities to create both basic and complex artwork. All thanks to its ability for integrating plugins and more. On the other hand, if you are looking for a 3D designing tool, rather than just general painting, Paint 3D is worth the consideration. In case you are hunting for a professional designing utility, you can go for Affinity Designer which has a robust dashboard & a multitude of features, that the sky seems to be the limit on what can be created.
