Artrage 4 hits the streets

Artrage has released version 4 of its painting program, available for both Apple's MacOS X and Microsoft's Windows 8.

If it's run on on a Surface Pro tablet it makes full use of the touch capabilities and of course it fully uses pen systems on non-touch systems.

The package is easy to use (even for a non artist) and it doesn't take much time to get used to the various controls and painting techniques such as smearing and blending of oil paints and watercolours that flow into each other.

There's also nice features such as stencils (which can be painted on, but the paint only applies to the empty spaces on the stencil) and stickers that are just stuck onto a painting.

A nice feature is tracing where an image is loaded as the background - but not as part of the image being painted - and then it can be traced. When it's saved, it's only the tracing and not the original image, though the same process could be achieved using layers.

Artrage also fully supports Wacom features available with some of their stylus' such as Pressure, Tilt, Barrel Rotation, and the Airbrush Wheel.

It's available for $49.90 from the Artrage Store. There is also a version available for Apple's iPhone/iPad.

Wacom Cintiq 12WX

Wacom has launched a £700 tablet the Cintiq 12WX.

It has a 12.1" display and comes with a pressure sensitive pen, it's equivalent to a Intuous3 with an in-built display.

Aimed at professional users who want a realistic drawing surface, the display resolution is 1280 x 800, then pen has 1024 levels of sensitivity and there are several colour profiles.

It has a VGA and DVI interface so can act as a second or even third display for most systems (though it can be used as a primary display).

It can be used for "touching-up" graphics accurately, though white-boarding also seems a logical use.

£700 is considerably cheaper than previous models.