Digital painting became a real interesting occupation once the first programs dedicated to it were released. Its advantages over traditional painting are the ability to use layers which are developed independently, unlimited undo and redo operations for the brush strokes and other operations performed or virtual color palettes consisting of millions of colors, and even more. Today’s digital painting program is called TwistedBrush and comes as a trial version free to use for 21 days. The installation kit has 11MB and the setup process is a piece of cake.

Once you finish downloading and installing the program, this trip can start. Before everything, I have to tell you a few things about the interface of this program. When starting it for the first time, TwistedBrush will display a welcome screen that can help you find your way through its interface. This screen acts like a basic help tool and can be quite useful for intermediate users, but beginners won’t get only quick hints on how to perform jobs using this program, without many details, but more specific indications. The program’s workspace has a dusty look, the item that I don’t like at all being the black and white icons. Come on, guys, was it so hard to draw some colored, nice icons for the toolbar? Leaving the menu bar and the toolbar behind, the element that takes up most space on the interface is the drawing area, having a tool control panel to its left. In the left panel you can take advantage of the paper, brush and color selection tools, adjust settings for the currently selected brush, choose your color from the easily accessible color palettes, adjust it or open the layers panel.

Until I start talking about the amazing things that can be done with TwistedBrush, I will tell you about how are your documents organized. After a few hours exploration of Twisted Brush, what immediately struck me was that the program could not only be used as a digital sketchpad and paint program. With the current functionality of Twisted Brush, it near rivals many other Paperless Animation systems on the market today. It is missing certain core functions of a paperless system, such as scanner support, and camera and compilation features. However I can see where it would be very easy to add these aspects as module features. However its inherent ability to allow a artist the ability to ink, and paint combined with TB’s unique Book and Tracing Pad feature could indeed be used as a Paperless system. Impressive considering I am sure this was never Mr. Carlino’s intention.

While most of the features of the program are indeed impressive, being in a relatively young state of production there are bound to be a few aspects that could require some attention. The beautiful thing about this however is that it is obvious Pixarra listens to their customers requests, and acts upon them! New upgraded versions of Twisted Brush seem to be released on average every 10-14 days.

The programs lack of a dockable panel structure for its tool panels was somewhat of a disappointment. However this could be because I am used to working on larger more robust programs that have a need for a large number of panels to be open at any given moment. However having the ability to have my tool panels on my second monitor and a blank sheet to work on filling my primary display would be nice.

Increased layer support would also be nice. While Twisted Brush does have layer architecture built in; it is clumsy and awkward to use properly at the moment. I am sure that with enough time it’s use would become second nature, but there are enhancements that could be made.
The Background Layer seems to lack the ability to be able to be promoted to a higher level. Because of this the user is forced to use cut and paste commands to alter the artwork on the BG layer.
As well, when you turn off the program, or navigate away from the image you are working on internally the program automatically falls back to the BG layer. It would be nice to see the program automatically remember what layer you were working on, and return you to that same layer.

Pros
This program is small, easy enough to use for most of us, and the built in content is extremely rich. It can load and save layered PSD and TIFF files, and everything comes for an extremely competitive price that you’ll have to pay if you want to continue using it after the trial period. The last thing that needs to be mentioned here is that it uses layers, and I am sure that you’ll find at least twice more goodies than I did!

Cons
First bad thing that hit me was that TwistedBrush has a lot of keyboard shortcuts missing, which takes away a lot of the speed that can be achieved using them. The help contents is insufficient, at least, since “absent” would be too rough. Most of the interface should be polished to make it look like a program from this century, and the speed could be improved, I am sure of that.

No matter the drawbacks, I love this “twisted” program! The trial version can be used successfully to learn using the full program, since it has no limitations, you can even export your work, without any watermarks or resolution limits! Pixarra TwistedBrush is on the right path, but still has to work on some areas to become an excellent program. Let’s help it achieve that, use it without any hesitation, you can become a talented digital painter in no time!