Digital painting and drawing are creative and beautiful hobbies to have. With practice you can make yourself better in doing it. It’s hard to choose among so many different softwares and art apps, and some of them are quite expensive. So, here are 4 free digital painting and drawing apps to check out!

Believe me, when I was browsing through ArtStation & DeviantArt, I saw some terrific art and it blew my mind! I thought, ‘God, I too want to make them’, but how? This was the first thing that came into my mind. So I started searching for apps/softwares. I searched on Google and YouTube, and found titles from Photoshop to Paint tool Sai. Mostly, they all were paid software, and some of them have a price which is not exactly affordable.

When it comes to digital painting, Autodesk SketchBook is one of the best softwares available on the internet and now it is available for free. Yes! Recently Autodesk launched their fully featured version of SketchBook for free, for everyone.

SketchBook has been in the market for a long time. It is one of those apps that I saw so many great artists using and recommending, because of its many great features. Realistic pencil & brush flow and a wide variety of brushes and tools. One of the best parts about SketchBook is its water colour effects. It has an amazing colour blending feature which feels very realistic. SketchBook also has organic media effects, which will give you a feeling of painting on real canvas.

You can use different types of pencils, brush textures and tools to create landscape paintings, animations, 3D art and sketches.

Available on: Windows, MacOS, Android, iPad, iPhone.

Get it here: https://sketchbook.com/

Krita is a great alternative to Photoshop. The good thing about this software is that you can learn how to use it from its official website where they will not only provide you its manuals, but they will also provide you tutorials and how to’s, teaching you all about brushes, how to make anime characters, and it’s all for free.

Krita’s layout is somewhat similar to Photoshop and its various brushes and tools are similar to Autodesk Sketchbook. Krita is one of those free softwares recommended by many great artists, and it works greatly.

In Krita, you can insert pictures, add layers, make high quality paintings. You can customise brushes, their textures and density. You can use their tools like chalk, sponge, tissue paper according to your needs. Krita also has really great blending effects and organic media effects, which makes it an amazing software to add to this list.

Available on: Windows, MacOS, Linux.

Get it here: https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/

FireAlpaca is a widely used software for digital painting. It has a basic and simple layout that you can customise the way want. FireAlpaca also has pretty brush textures & effects, and you can also add more brush textures by downloading and adding them for free.

You can use FireAlpaca to create comics by using its template feature. There are many options available on FireAlpaca. Create different shapes and 3D figures. Snap tool has a correction feature that will improve your lines and strokes by smoothing it out if you have shaky hands. To create anime characters, it has onion skin mode.

Available on: Windows, MacOS.

Get it here: https://firealpaca.com/

MediBang made it on the list because of its so many features and availability. Yeah! MediBang is available on almost all the platforms. The good thing about MediBang is that you can create anything in it, it’s the software that works the way you want.

In MediBang, you can create comics, manga, and you can also create your own comic templates/panels by using the comic panel creator tool, and create them the way you want. You can also download different types of effects, additional fonts and stickers within the software.

MediBang is the only software in this list which gives you cloud space to save your art piece.

Available on: Windows, MacOS, Android, iPad, iPhone.

Get it here: https://medibangpaint.com/en/app-download/

Contributed by Ashutosh Dubey