Hello everyone, this is my first article! Today I’m going to show you 5 free software packages that will help you bring out your creative side with your computer without spending any money! Although these free programs are not as good as if you were to shell out for the real deals, they still offer a wide range of features which will leave you with the same great end product!

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

After years of personal use and seeing it being built up from a simple undergraduate college senior design project, I can definitely say Paint.NET is worth a try. Personally, I am not one for spending lots of money on more expensive software packages, so this application was perfect for me; it had all the qualities you would find in a more up-market suite, such as Photoshop. I must also say, it’s extremely easy to use; anyone wanting to start on photo manipulation and doesn’t know where to start, well here it is! Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.

So your first impressions of that thumbnail? An awful application? At the first look, I thought PhotoScape was going to be rubbish, but I dug in deeper and found it is jam-packed with features, while remaining very easy to use. Photoscape has many parts to it; including a viewer, editor, batch processor, raw converter, file re-namer, print layout tool, screen capture tool, color picker, and more! The great thing that I found about PhotoScape is it crams all of these features without compromise to the ease-of-use.

ArtRage is the easy to use, stylish painting package that lets you get painting from the moment you open it up. You can paint with oils, sketch with pencils, sprinkle glitter, and more. You can paint with gold leaf, silver foil, and other metallic colors. You can even load in your photos as Tracing Images to help you recreate them as paintings.

ArtRage was a free program for Windows only, but new features were added and a Mac version was developed; now it is priced at $19.95. The Free Edition lives on however, with some full version features disabled. I found ArtRage fun with a mouse, but when you hook it up to a graphics tablet and use its multi-monitor support, it’s something special!

Now, this may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a little different from the last 3 packages; enter Anim8or!

Anim8or is a 3D modeling and character animation program that I have written over the past couple of years, not as a commercial endeavor, but because I love 3D graphics, animation, and programming.

If you are interested in modelling for games or CGI movies, you most probably have heard of 3DStudio MAX or Lightwave. Anim8or provides a free animation package to satisfy the modelling expert or novice, just as the more expensive and commercial software do. So if you are looking for a way into 3D modelling, why not try it out? If the menu systems or workspace looks scary at first glance, there are extensive tutorials and videos on their site to get you started.

Best until last? Oh yes!

Alchemy is an open drawing project aimed at exploring how we can sketch, draw, and create on computers in new ways. Alchemy isn’t software for creating finished artwork, but rather a sketching environment that focuses on the absolute initial stage of the creation process. Experimental in nature, Alchemy lets you brainstorm visually to explore an expanded range of ideas and possibilities in a serendipitous way.

Alchemy is something truly new and creative, you would be crazy not to try it. When you launch the program you are given a simple line tool, I was quite surprised and I didn’t know what to do next, but after a few minutes of exploring the menus I had created my first masterpiece/squiggle!

Alchemy is definitely something unique; you can use your microphone to distort the picture, use random tools to make amazing effects and add an increasing amount of modules to make the program more functional. The first image in this post was made in Alchemy, and it is something amazing that this simple software can do something like that… Check out their website for more videos and works.