Forum Friday – Art Rage

Each Friday I pick a rather noteworthy post from the forum to share with the community. The idea is to highlight the fantastic resources, ideas, websites, and lessons that other teachers have taken the time to share with others, not just me flapping my jaw about my experiences. Today’s Forum Friday comes from the General Art & Technology Forum courtesy of both seans, a member that posted some great material in his short time on the forum, and nicole, our resident art teacher and forum moderator.

Here’s the original post by seans, followed by nicole’s comments about her experience with ArtRage :

seans:
I found this program recently and have begun trying it out. It is a free paint program that tries to simulate painting on a canvass. You can choose from several brushes and pens, plus you can change the pressure that you’re using. It’s pretty cool.

Share and Enjoy!

It’s at:

http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html

nicole:
I finally got my computer to run this program. I had to hit “ignore” when it starts up and gives me a box about not being admin and some other such nonesense.

Anyway, I totally love this FREE program!

The pros of Art Rage: 1. It’s free. 2. the paint brush effects are amazing! you can see texture like a real brush. you run out of paint like a real brush, and you can smudge colors together like real paint. 3. the markers are too cool. if you continue to color in the same spot, you get black. no matter what. just like in elementary school when you experimented with your markers until you wore a hole in the paper. 4. the crayons have a very nice texture to them.

The cons: Using a touchpad on a laptop does not give you the kind of control to create detailed images. I had a really hard time making anything other than abstract art with my touchpad.

All in all, a very exciting program from an artist’s perspective. Plus it teaches kids about mixing colors (think lesson on primary/secondary colors). Something fun for the kids to play around with in art class to reinforce those ideas of color and abstraction.

Straight from the horse’s….er, art teacher’s mouth. ArtRage is an amazingly life-like painting program. It should be pointed out that ArtRage is also a completely FREE download (the best kind) and works on both MAC or PC. The image posted at the beginning of this post was created entirely using ArtRage, in case you were wondering just how much like real painting the software is. There’s also a 20 dollar version if you want extra features, but the free version is pretty amazing on its own.