0 Comments Art Review: SmoothDraw

Program - SmoothDraw (Qingrui Li)
Tested version - 4.1.4.0

Price - Free
Systems - Windows 7/8.1/10
Official website - http://www.smoothdraw.com/

Raster or Vector - Raster

Ease Of Use - Dead simple, but is due to little if any options. My guess is it's aimed at young children, or for playing around/warming-up before starting projects elsewhere. It does however start-up near instantly and takes up virtually no system resources - making lag unheard of.

I mention the program only as my little nephew enjoys it for some of the options that are not typically found in beginner/simple art programs.

Tools - The 1st image shows a list of 10 quick shortcut tools, and clicking the arrow brings-up the full list (yes it cuts off part of the bottom row icons). You can however click and drag a tool to the top to make a new quick selection tool.

In the 2nd image is the options (Size and Flow) and tends to be the average options for most tools.

Color Selection - The colors are selectable by a color bar. A palette can be setup with colors by right-clicking a palette box to add the current color - left-clicking a palette color box selects the color. Double-clicking the selected color in the Foreground/Background colors (along the top) opens another color bar with RGB sliders, and numerical hex color input.

Layers - As seen in the 1st image layers can be Moved up or down, and Visibility (on/off). Clicking the menu option allows Adding new layers, Deleting, and Merging. The 2nd image is the properties window (from the last layer icon) and allows Renaming the layer, Opacity, and 4 Blending modes.

Extras - The last thing to mention is that under the menu Options, Zoom is accessed (preset at 25%, 50%, 100%, 200%, and 400%), and a page view Rotate at preset 45 degrees per click.

Final thoughts - There is no need for the typical Pros/Cons and other sections, the program is what it is.

SmoothDraw often comes up when searching online for art related programs, and worth a quick review as it's much better than others I found (those I won't bother to post about).