0 Comments Art Review: Pixia

Program - Pixia (Isao Maruoka)
Tested version - 6.04f

Price - Free
Systems - Windows 7/8.1/10
Official website - http://www.ne.jp/asahi/mighty/knight/

Raster or Vector - Raster

Ease Of Use -  Not for the faint of heart, or anyone who gives up easily. 😲 I found few aspects of Pixia I would not consider difficult at best.

After clicking around awhile to try things I got my Dopefish script to create the artwork in Pixia, as I do for every review. However, trying to test Pixia out fully myself I found it frustratingly impossible.

There is no text near almost any button or options, and none shown when hovering over objects either! See the above image of what has to be the brush options.

The large circle with the line I assume is the brush Angle, the slider below is Opacity, and the only text is brush Preset sizes. To change the brush Size I figured out is done by clicking and dragging inside the circle (the red dot).

Clicking various options and trying tools often does small or no changes, so learning the program by trial and error is nearly impossible too. This also has to be repetitively done for every on screen button as well... and then memorized...

Using the window arrow buttons (bottom-right in the image) shows another panel that replaces the previous one, with many panels to cycle through to return to the original one.

Many other panel windows have them too, so there are plenty of options to be found.

See the main screenshot again for a idea of what this all entails.

Bugs and Errors - I was reading the tutorials for even the basics to write a review as usual; however, I ran into many problems with the software.

The mouse pointer was at one end of the screen and the brush tool on the other side (and was reversed in movements of the mouse - restarting Pixia solved that). For the longest time I thought it was a unknown button option. 😆

Various screen glitches when using selection tools hinted at internal program drawing problems. Adjusting the Smoothing in the menu File -> Preference -> Advanced options resulted in all my layers disappearing in the Layer window (program screen rendering issue too).

At that point that ended my interest in reading any more tutorials, and the review as well - a steep learning curve and several internal program problems.

Final thoughts - If you are interested in the challenge of using this program there are tutorials and likely the best way to figure anything out that is not a universal icon image. See their outdated tutorial list.

I will say it appears to be a feature packed program, and is the only reason I am posting anything about it. Best of luck to anyone who attempts it.