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Looking for a new art program
3 years ago
Hello,
So... well, this is frustrating.
I've been a long time user of a program called ArtRage for years now, from ArtRage 4 to ArtRage 6. And occasionally, the programs would just crash and eat one of my unsaved drawings and I'd lose a few hours of work. And I'd get pissed because the program didn't have an automatic save feature, but I'd recover and move on. I should just save my artwork more often, right?
Well, tonight I was working on a major painting, a commission that I accepted a while ago and was trying to finish. I've put, I don't know, 30 to 35 hours of work into it so far. I had just gotten the grass and trees looking the way I want and I told the program to save the file, because I didn't want to lose what I had.
The program crashed. Restarted, attempted to load the file, and it says the file is corrupted. The file size on disk now reads as 0 bytes.
I'm done with this. I'm just done. I can't keep using an art program that is so unstable it will swallow days worth of work. I went to the support forum and they say they can troubleshoot most problems but won't attempt to fix corrupted files.
This is just so, so fucking disheartening. I've used ArtRage for years, but their unrepentant "lol we don't care" about failures is too much. And the program doesn't even autosave. That's the most requested feature people have asked for for years, and they keep saying no. So, I'm looking for a new art program. I'm currently getting recommendations for Clip Studio Paint, so I'll take a look at that, but it will be a couple of weeks with whatever program I choose before I'm comfortable drawing again. x-x
So... well, this is frustrating.
I've been a long time user of a program called ArtRage for years now, from ArtRage 4 to ArtRage 6. And occasionally, the programs would just crash and eat one of my unsaved drawings and I'd lose a few hours of work. And I'd get pissed because the program didn't have an automatic save feature, but I'd recover and move on. I should just save my artwork more often, right?
Well, tonight I was working on a major painting, a commission that I accepted a while ago and was trying to finish. I've put, I don't know, 30 to 35 hours of work into it so far. I had just gotten the grass and trees looking the way I want and I told the program to save the file, because I didn't want to lose what I had.
The program crashed. Restarted, attempted to load the file, and it says the file is corrupted. The file size on disk now reads as 0 bytes.
I'm done with this. I'm just done. I can't keep using an art program that is so unstable it will swallow days worth of work. I went to the support forum and they say they can troubleshoot most problems but won't attempt to fix corrupted files.
This is just so, so fucking disheartening. I've used ArtRage for years, but their unrepentant "lol we don't care" about failures is too much. And the program doesn't even autosave. That's the most requested feature people have asked for for years, and they keep saying no. So, I'm looking for a new art program. I'm currently getting recommendations for Clip Studio Paint, so I'll take a look at that, but it will be a couple of weeks with whatever program I choose before I'm comfortable drawing again. x-x
I haven't explored its features because I can't live without Paint Tool SAI's awesome selection engine.
Sketchbook does have autosave and also wants you to save a new copy of your work every time you start it up.
And yes, it will still crash occasionally, but it does have that autosave function you so badly require, along with a whole bunch of neat little features you might enjoy, and unlike ArtRage, it is actually being actively developed, with version 5.0 having come out just recently. The only disadvantage is that some of the functions (including most of the vector environment) are still very much a work in progress, but if you are simply looking for a good, reliable and budget solution for digital art, I'd suggest you give it a shot!
It is free, maybe sometime have bugs, but works very stable. At least for me, it still never crashed.