The drips in Realistic Paint Studio drip down the page but that’s it. The drip engine is pretty cool, but if you’re really into making drips, Rebelle is what you need. I want them to know what the different sized brushes look like, what a graphic stick looks like, what calligraphy nibs look like before they’re attached to the end of the pen. I want kids to know what a blending stump looks like. This software is especially useful for a child artist because if your kid is anything like mine, they have gone straight into digital art without fully experiencing realworld media. You seem to be really mixing paint rather than picking a computer colour from a palette. You collect your tools and put them down the bottom of the screen for easy grabbing, which now feels more like a desk. When you pick a tool, it seems you’re taking it out of a beautiful art box. They must have known this was their main issue, because Realistic Paint Studio utilises skeuomorphic graphics to hew as closely to the realworld experience of painting as is digitally possible. This is a huge problem when you’re working with slightly complicated software. The other problem with PaintStorm - this crew doesn’t put out good documentation, at least not in English.

The brush engine is really cool, but so different from every other brush engine out there that each time I go back to it, I’ve forgotten exactly how it works. PaintStorm is a powerful but buggy/laggy program. Let’s talk about PaintStorm Studio for a minute. One, I already have plenty of excellent software that does the same thing and more. In that time I was impressed enough to buy it, but I purchased it for my 12-year-old, not for me. You get a very short trial period (like, half an hour?) rather than a month of opens or whatever. Hence, I’ll write my first impressions here. I’m not sure how many painters looking for this exact bit of software are actually going to find it. Google search for ‘realistic paint’ software and pretty much every major digital art software has used it in their branding, which means all the others rank higher. I would never have found Realistic Paint Studio had I not been on their mailing list.

Paintstorm studio review