Speedy Painter

Based on OpenGL, Speedy Painter is a free painting application wrapped up in an attractive and intuitive interface.

Featuring standard options for inexperienced users, along with some advanced settings for those who've been around the block, the tool provides a fun way to unwind using a desktop or graphic tablet. You can either create drawings or put together multiple layers to produce videos, such as presentations.

Before proceeding any further, you should know that this app is not meant for professional use, such as photo editing or web design. When it comes to graphic tablets, it uses digitizers to detect the pen pressure and modify the stroke opacity or size accordingly.

The main application window has a pleasant appearance and neatly organized structure. It shows all available drawing tools and file options on the right, together with a color wheel and current layers on the right.

Its commands are not that intuitive for first-time users but you can examine a list with all of them, together with their corresponding key shortcuts, and even remap the hotkeys.

Although it provides only a brush as the painting method, you can personalize its size, texture, density and color to create the desired effect, as well as set the tool to vary the size or flow according to the pressure. Settings can be restored to default.

It's possible to zoom in and out, fit the canvas to the window, flip the canvas or rotate it to any angle, make freehand selections, crop any section of the drawing, switch to perspective viewing mode, fill color with a bucket tool, apply gradient color, and correct mistakes with an eraser. What's more, you can insert an external image, place it next to the current drawing, and use it as a point of reference. Undoing and redoing actions is possible.

You can add as many layers as you want to the project and easily juggle them, adjust their opacity level, or make them temporarily invisible to compare changes. Images can be saved to files with the .jpg, .png, .bmp, .tif or .spf format (.spf preserves layers). Meanwhile, a sequence of images can be saved as a project and later resumed, previewed within the main app window, or exported as an .avi video.

The software application didn't hang, crash or prompt error dialogs in our tests. It had low-to-moderate impact on computer performance as far as CPU and RAM consumption was concerned, presented smooth and pleasant animations when performing some type of commands, and delivered high-quality videos.

This is seemingly a rudimentary application that might trick you into believing it's just a fancier version of Windows Paint. It may not be filled with rich features, but Speedy Painter definitely deserves your attention if you're looking for a fun and versatile drawing tool.