Performance: Pixarra's attention to performance is a top priority. As an artist draws and paints the tools should disappear from thought and allow focus on the creative process rather than waiting for the tool to finish its job.  In addition the responsiveness of the brush tools should be quick and show marks on the page instantly to allow the artist to enter the "zone".

High Precision 64 Bit Brush Engine: Most graphic programs offer at most 32 bits of color resolution. TwistedBrush represents all image data internally at a full 64 bits of color resolution.  This allows for super smooth color mixing and alpha blending.

Brushes: TwistedBrush has over 1500 diffferent brushes included.  These range from very simple color dots to realistic representations of natural artist tools to very wild brushes.  Here is a very small sampling of some of the brushes that are available.

Airbrush:  Smoothly feathered at the edges as you'd expect an airbrush would be. This brush dab was done with no additional brush effects.

Watercolor crayons:  Drawing with a textured wet watercolor crayon with color blending and some grainyness.

Oil pastel: Even more grain shows in this brush, but it still blends with the existing color that is already on the page.

Gausy brush: Actually created with the basic oil pastel brush style but altered with a multiply and jitter brush effect.

Fine oil brush: Based on one of the basic brush types that draws with individual bristles of color, dynamically changing with each stroke.  This basic brush with modified with the multiply and jitter brush effects.

Color pencil: A basic color pencil brush type but with a darken color blending brush effect.  Brush effects that blend colors allow for a variety of on the fly color mixing.  In this case blue strokes were drawn first.  The red strokes when drawn blend with the blend stroke just like color pencils where lighter colors don't overlay darker colors. However notice the yellow, with repeated stroking the lighter color can overlay the darker blue.

Wet watercolors: A brush that blends and dilutes with the color that is already on the canvas.

Thick oil paint: Each bristle mark is visible with each pushing its way throught the paint that is already layed down.

Vegas scarf: Brush effects are used here to alter the basic realistic brush type to create a brush that doesn't exist in reality.  In this case the spike effect is used to give the overall feeling of the storke.

Key features:

- Filters: Over 50 filters can be used to quickly alter and adjust your image.  The includes basic photographic filters that adjust brightness and contrast or equalize the colors, artist filters that allow you to mimic a oil painting with a click of the mouse, blurring filters, noise filters, noise generation filters, distorting filters, sharpening filters etc.

- Tracing Paper: A source image is shown below the current paper as if the current paper was as thin as tracing paper.  This allows for using a photograph or another drawing as a guide when doing a new picture. With a press of the hot key the tracing paper is turned off and on allowing you to check on your progress.

- Cloners: Related to the Tracing Paper feature Cloners are brushes that have a Trace Blend or Trace Color brush effects applied to them.  Used in combination with the tracing paper feature, when on not only does the source image show through but the color that is used for the drawing is based on the color of the source image rather then the color that is currently selected.  This use in combination with the other powerful brush effects makes for a very realistic representation of a painted or drawn version of the source image.  An entire ArtSet of 60 brushes is included that has a variety of cloning brushes.

Masks: With masks part of an image can be protected from changes.  This works just like traditional artist masks or friskets.  There are numerous ways to create and edit masks, they can be painted on with masking brushes, added to with special masking tools for rectangles and ellipses, the masking magic wand can be used to mask area of similar color or you can even convert and existing image to a mask.

Layers: Imagine overlaying sheets of clear drawing material on top of each other and being able to freely paint and draw on each layer.  This is the idea of layers.  A powerful system of image creation that allows for continued editing on a image even after it is nearing completion.  For example if painting a landscape.  On the background layer place the general tone of the picture blocking in color areas.  On the next layer up paint the sky, next the clouds, next distance land or trees, another layer for middle ground areas, and last for the foreground. If you decide to repaint the clouds no problem go back to the cloud layer and touch them up or start the clouds from scratch. The other areas of your work are not affected.

More about Pixarra TwistedBrush v13.2