In my “Essentials” is basically the “light” version of Painter. With that said, these are my opinions of my two favorites: Corel Painter and SketchBook Pro. Pressure sensitive touch screens and drawing tablets are the most important tools for digital sketching, and matching that hardware with good software will give any artist the tools that he or she needs to create stunning work. There is some interesting stuff available these days, and technology has finally reached a point where freehand sketching on the computer is not the clumsy and awkward challenge that it used to be. Computer graphics (and web design) was becoming the hot thing just as I was graduating from college, so I naturally fell into that and began pushing pixels instead of a pencil.īut the itch to sketch and draw has never left me, and I’m always evaluating the software options available for digital artists. Thirty years later, I’m still sketching – though not as much as I’d like. Sketching and drawing cars was my life, and I spent far too much time filling my school notebooks full of car renderings instead of actual schoolwork. I was obsessed with cars from a very early age, and by the time I was 7 I knew that I wanted to be a car designer when I grew up. I’ve been drawing ever since I can remember, and my primary focus was on cars.

Like many other lifelong artists, my early years were spent sketching and drawing whenever and wherever I could. Of all the software choices out there today, which is the best? In my opinion, there are only two real choices: Corel Painter and Autodesk SketchBook Pro.Īdobe Photoshop can’t even compare to these two programs, as it doesn’t perform well enough to be able to follow fast sketchers – I draw really fast, and there are many times that Photoshop can’t keep up with me and the lines it renders are fragmented and chunky.

Autodesk sketchbook pro 2010