Artweaver is a freeware graphics editor for Windows developed by Boris Eyrich to indulge in creative painting. It is capable of simulating a wide range of classical effects (such as oil paints, acrylics, pastels, pencils, airbrushes, etc) to create natural-looking artistic images. It can be used on Linux too with wine. Artweaver has a very clean and welcoming window that actually helps both professional and amateur artists to create artworks without being concerned about complex maneuvers. It is an able competitor to PhotoShop. Read the review after the break for details.

Tools that Artweaver Offers

If you have been working on digital painting, then you must be interested in this segment specially. The tools that I have found interesting in Artweaver are

  1. Selection Tools: Rectangular and elliptical selection freehand and polygonal lasso, magic wand
  2. Brushes: Standard, airbrush, cloning, and a ton of "artist" brushes (like charcoal, chalk, felt pen, pencil, impasto)
  3. Shapes Tool: Rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, polygon, and custom shapes
  4. Other Tools: Eraser, paint bucket, stamp, crop, and move tools
  5. Pressure Settings: Effects like opacity, grain, jitter, angle, and flow.
  6. A nice set of color palettes (Windows, Mac, Web, etc.)
  7. Filters
  8. Grid and perspective grid overlays.

Features (Publishers' Description)

  • Support of many different digital brushes e.g. chalk, charcoal, pencils…
  • A wide variety of adjustment settings to customize the default brushes or to create new brushes.
  • Standard image editing tools like gradient, crop, fill and selection tools.
  • Support for the most common file formats like AWD (Artweaver), BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD.
  • Transparency and Layers support.
  • Effect filters like sharpen, blur, emboss and mosaic.
  • Editable text layers.
  • Pen Tablet support for a realistic feeling.
  • History function to und/redo last editing steps.
  • Expandable by Plug-In modules (Artweaver Standard).
  • Support for many languages through language files.

System Requirements

  • Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista.
  • Pentium compatible processor, 600 MHz or greater (1000 MHz recommended).
  • 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended).
  • 30 MB of available hard disk space.
  • 800*600 pixels or greater monitor resolution (1024*768 pixels recommended).
  • 15-bit color display (24-bit recommended).

Pros

  1. Diverse Features
  2. Less resource hungry compared to Photoshop and Corel Paint
  3. Digital paining at its very natural form
  4. Easy to get started
  5. Plenty of flexibility
  6. Can be extended by plugins which is great
  7. Above everything else, its a Freeware

Cons

  1. There is not much a user support and user base. You won't get as much documentation, help or suggestions as easily as we get from Adobe Photoshop or Corel paint.
  2. It doesn't have that subtle sophistication of Corel paint. Paints don't mix together and blend like real paint and it doesn't have watercolor layers that can stay wet between sessions.
  3. Any previously saved PSD files through Photoshop will open, but they will look at bit flattened. I hope they do something about this one

In Conclusion

Artweaver, despite having some limitations (no major one though) is a very handy tool to edit photos and make paintings. What I liked about it is its resourcefulness though being simple. Some people say Artweaver is a clone to Photoshop or Paint.NET or etc. Whatever be the case, Artweaver, being a freeware, paints with independence and high hopes for future.