Tech Trends for Teens: Free Graphic Programs for Digital Art

Using Free Internet Tools to Make Cool Digital Art

As we gear up for Teen Tech Week and the RVA Sticker Contest this week, take advantage of free graphic tools, drawing, and graphic programs to meet your digital art creative needs.

Artpad is an online painting tool that allows you to see the paintbrush. You can change colors, brush sizes, paint opacity, and you can even splatter paint or write on your drawing. It will let you replay your drawing and save it or any frame from the replay.

Brushter is a free online painting website with a twist. Its paintbrushes all produce textured strokes. Like other painting websites, you can choose your colors, shades, and widths. You need the Adobe Shockwave Player to use it. This tool is produced by the National Gallery of Art.

Do Ink is a drawing and animation application that allows you to use vector-drawing tools to create your pictures.In addition to the traditional drawing tool, you also get art props that will add to the drawings you create. Do Ink is available only in a downloadable form for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

Draw Island allows you to paint or draw. It is unique in that you can create animations with this tool as well. However, the animation feature currently works only if you use Firefox (Mozilla) asyour Web browser.

FlockDraw is an excellent choice for collaborative business drawing. It allows an unlimited number of users to participate for free. Think of a community whiteboard in an online format and you will have the essence of FlockDraw.

Gimp is a very powerful image manipulation program, great for photo retouching and image creation. There are other downloads, GTK and runtime environment, required for this program to work properly. This program currently runs on Linux, Windows (XP and Vista), Mac OSX, and some Unix-based systems.

Graffiti Plado allows you to bring the street to your art. Use spray paint on a wall-textured background to create your ideas and save them. You can adjust color, size of the spray, strength, and even whether or not you want to see and hear the spray can while you paint.

Pixia Originally a Japanese only edition, Pixia is a very nice paint tool with full layers of support and many other features. The English version website does lack information and support so you will probably need to search the web for information on learning to use this tool. This is currently a Windows only program and does support some drawing tablets.

Odosketch is interesting because the sketches it creates resemble pencil and watercolor. The tips of your brush create both thin lines and wide ribbons. When you select your color you can also select the width of the tip. Create your sketch free online and then save it to your hard drive or disk.

Onemotion is an online painting website. It allows you to adjust brush width and color, but its unique feature is that your speed controls the width of your line.

Open Clip Art  is a site where you can download free clip art.

Skencil  is an interactive vector drawing program for Unix and Linux operating systems built on the Python language. This program has tons of features such as gradient fills, bezier curves and you can bend text along paths to name a few.

Sketchpad is a free online paint tool, but the effects it can create are awesome. There are stamp, wallpaper, geometric design, and fill options. Its unique color adjusting method allows you to visualize your scheme more easily. It also has an option of painting in two tones.

Ultimate Paint is an image creation and manipulation program for Windows systems. This is a pretty compact and fast-running graphics program with plenty of features.

Viscosity is a unique abstract art creation site. Like other online painting and drawing websites, you can save your work on your computer. The difference is you begin viscosity with a mixed palette, which you drag your “brush” through. This tool is a little more difficult to use effectively, but it is also extremely enjoyable.

Wixie has all the traditional paint and drawing options, but adds in three-dimensional, crayon, and stretch functions. This website also allows you to choose the texture of your fills.

Information was taken from Mashable.com and Smallbiztrends.com