Powerful, fun, and cheap!  The three best words to describe a new program, wouldn’t you agree?  I (Steph) wanted to share a tool with you today that definitely fits all three of those adjectives.  Look at these layouts, all of them have this program in common:

(layout by Audrey77 notice the brushstroke under ‘at the’)

(layout by mamamenz notice the glitter)

(layout by PlientjeB notice the drawing of the people)

(layout by thomsen notice the glitter alpha)

I’m sure that many of you are on to me after reading the sub-headings under the layouts .  The powerful, fun, and cheap program I wanted to share with you today is ArtRage.  There is a Windows and Mac version available and it will set you back $25 for the full version!  As you can see from the layouts above, this program can create some amazing art effects.  You can use oils, markers, glitter, pencils, chalks and many more mediums.  The most amazing thing is how realistic the textures are especially when mixing oil paints!  The program is pretty intuitive as well and won’t take much time at all before you will be creating some digital art for your layouts.

I gathered some tutorials together to help you get going and to help those of us already using ArtRage to maximize it’s capabilities:

Tutorials from Ambient (makers of the program)

Tutorial from a Nickelodeon Cartoonist (does covers for the magazine at least) scroll all the way to the bottom for a list of ArtRage tuts and links.

Turorials list in the ArtRage Forum

You can also download a limited trial version of  ArtRage for free, so go ahead, give it a try and share with us what you make!

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