Art Rage 3 Studio Pro

Gazing at a painting to which you’ve just added the finishing brush strokes is certainly a fulfilling experience – until you notice the cat’s paw marks dotted throughout your lounge.

Add the cost of supplies, the hassle of finding storage space for everything and painting can become a chore. So why not use a computer instead?

Step forward Art Rage 3 Studio Pro, which replicates real-world painting and drawing techniques including crayons, chalk, felt pen, oil and watercolours, and more.

The program’s interface is easy to use and the tools are smartly laid out within a quarter-circle on each side of the painting area. The one of the left contains the selection and eraser tools and all the different painting instruments, each of which can be resized using the percentage bar in the bottom left-hand corner. The quarter-circle on the right, meanwhile, holds the colour palette.

We were impressed with the realism of the program’s painting techniques: the oil brush delivered authentic paint texture and natural colour mixing – if you paint blue over red, for example, you will get a purple mixture.

One of the main advantages of art software is that you can correct any mistakes easily and experiment with your work. Fortunately, Art Rage has an unlimited ‘undo’ feature so you can quickly amend anything you’re not happy with.

The program also includes a tool called Stickers that provides a collection of shapes, symbols and art clippings to be dragged onto the canvas. You can also make stickers using your own images so you can quickly create a grassy, or even snowy, background across the screen.

Similarly, stencils can be added to a piece of artwork. Again, these come in a variety of shapes and sizes – our favourite was the ‘Zap, Pow, Blam’ design that can add a great touch to comic or cartoon-style creations.

We also enjoyed using the program’s Tracing feature, which will set a photo of your choice as the background and make it transparent so you can paint over it.

If you are building an advanced image you may wish to structure it in parts and this can be done using Layers, as found in most modern photo-editing programs. A different piece of or part of the artwork can be produced in each layer – the layers are then stacked and combined to make the final product.

Art Rage 3 Studio Pro won’t make an artist of someone with no artistic ability but at the same time it does make it easier to try your hand.

The program is excellent value: it doesn’t include the advanced features of the competing Corel Painter 11 (which costs a whopping £270) but it’s easier to use. It’s available for both Mac and Windows computers.