Hello all! I'm trying my hand at virtual art and would like to hear some recommendations on which software I should purchase. How do I know which one is best for what I want to create?

I'm best at sketching by hand and uploading the image (at least I've done this in the past with COREL DRAW something lol) and I want something that is VERY user-friendly, but has some advanced capabilities for when I'm ready to take a stab at tricky techniques.

Thank you! :D

i'd recommend paint tool sai, it's really easy to use (plus there are a bunch of guides if you don't know how to do something) but also has a lot of really neat features (stabilizer, customizable paint brushes, mappable keyboard hotkeys for literally anything). c:

if you are looking for a user friendly program, i'd recommend paint tool sai or firealpaca. they are very similar, but sai has more options and better brushes. But for something that has cooler features is photoshop. it's a little difficult to use at first, but once you get everything down it's really nice. Definitely can do more with photoshop and my preference of doing actual pieces with.

Thank you!!! I'll do some more research on those. :) My best friend has a version of photoshop for school and she's always posting cool things - so maybe I'll take the plunge into the depths of photoshop and learn it?! :D

I like Clip Studio Paint the best, it works a lot like Paint Tool SAI but it's more powerful and has way more features.

I didn't know if I should make a separate post for this or not and its from earlier this month but I'm curious if I bought clip studio paint would it be better to buy the digital version or the physical version and do I need to be connected to internet to use it? I'll have access half the time so that would be ok I'm just curious and I've been wanting to improve my digital art skills(which are lacking lol). For now I'm playing around with https://sketch.io/sketchpad/ for practice but it isn't very easy for me to use and the layer system is not my favorite >w<. I thought that using a better program might help with learning or at least make drawing easier. Sorry to ping on an over two week old post but I really wanted to know :3. [Edit] I used the site mentioned previously to make my forum image and coloring it was mega difficult and it still looks bad XD I swear I'm at least average on paper but digital is kicking my butt :P.

Gimp is a nice free one that I grew up with...

But I'm leaning towards Adobe stuff now, like Illustrator to be specific.

But I'm too cheap to pay for it, so yay for Photoshop.

depending on what you have i'd say paint tool sai is great for beginners! ( keep in mind sai doesn't run on mac w/o special instructions ) Also Gimp and Paint.net were the things I grew up on!!

As for right now I use Photoshop CC - the more practice you get with it the better! It's a great program but you should build up to using it!

Good luck!

I would recommend paint tool sai, it's a wonderful tool and has a stable tool so that your lines come out smooth if you have issues with drawing straight lines.

Going with the major consensus! Paint Tool Sai is a wonderful program. I have photoshop, Corel, and Clip and Sai is still one of my favorites. Clip is a good program as well- and often have sales around the holidays- but it's a bit more complex in comparison. I use the two in tandem and it works wonderfully. For a cheap beginners program Sai is certainly the way to go.

I would say either Sai or Krita. Sai is simpler and very, very light. It's very good if you don't have a powerful computer. Krita has a bunch of nice things like symmetry and perspective, is free, has a lot of awesome brushes and runs on probably every operational system ever.