Good, free, graphics program

Factual Questions
1

I’m trying to get in graphics so I can mainly paint/draw things and I find that Adobe Illustrator or Corel are way beyond me. I need a tutorial for the tutorial. Can anybody recommend a basic, free program that works fairly well and is easy to understand.

I have tried Wetpaint, Artrage and a couple others. I liked Wetpaint, but it only gives you 25 tries and then you have to buy it.

2

Have you tried GIMP?

It’s open-source (i.e. free), and while it’s got plenty of high-end features there are a whole load of tutorials online for the basics.

3

GIMP is good for bitmap graphics and to create graphic files that are compatible with Photoshop

For vector graphics, like Adobe Illustrator or Corel there is an open source program too:

Inkscape:

For GIMP:

4

And for free tutorials and online books, try the open source wikibooks:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

Enter GIMP or inkscape on the search.

5

And even 3d has now a not too shabby open source tool:

Blender.

6

Warning! Blender is powerful but it has a nonstandard user interface and a brick-wall learning curve. I still recommend it though; it’ll just take a while to learn.

Inkscape’s native file format is SVG. I think it can deal with Adobe Illustrator files, but you may be better off importing the SVGs into Illustrator.

The biggest difference between the free tools and Illustrator, Photoshop is that the free tools don’t have all the licensed cour swatches and CMYK printing support. They’re fine for online work.

7

I think there’s a subtle but distinct difference between image editing programs like Photoshop and drawing/painting programs like Artrage. There’s some overlap, but the functionality and user interface will usually be different.

This About.com page lists several painting programs, two of which seem to be free: Artweaver and Project Dogwaffle.

There’s also the free Paint.net image editor which is like a really simple version of Photoshop (so it might be easier to use) but it’s not really designed for artistic painting.

8

There’s also the very simple online drawing game iSketch (kinda like pictionary), which offers a studio mode where you can just draw and copy pictures. People have created some rather amazing sketches on iSketch using tools no more complex than MS Paint.

9

There is a great review of the best free image editors at TechSupportalert.com here.