QAquarelle

The computer is a powerful multifunctional tool that can be used in quite the range of domains of activity. Art makes no exceptions, and given the right set of tools, stunning pictures can be created using just your mouse. One suitable example is QAquarelle, letting you unleash your imagination on a virtual canvas.

By default, the interface is empty, except for the toolbars that hold all brushes you get to work with. Needless to say that you must start a new project, with the possibility to configure canvas size, as well as the texture, which has an effect on the drawing part itself.

The brush palette is not so abundant, with the possibility to choose from plain, watercolors, acrylics, oil, and ink, with several associated types. On the other hand, each brush can be customized by adjusting several sliders for drying speed, viscosity, opacity, staining power, scale, sensitivity, and jitter, but there’s only one slot for a custom brush.

A color picker tool can be used to pain with any given color. There’s also a dropper tool to manually pick a different tone, and you can save them to cache and easily pick them later on. The neat thing is that colors blend in similar to the way they do on a real canvas, and brush options really do have a saying in every minor detail.

The sad part is that you can’t import existing pictures to try and turn them into works of art. However, export options benefit from formats like JPG, PNG, BMP, and GIF, or you can save just the project if you consider there’s more work to be done.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that QAquarelle manages to live up to expectations, even though it’s not your common paint utility. The possibility to load pictures would have come in handy, but the way the canvas is configured and how colors blend in appeal to your artistic side, somehow encouraging you to be creative.