Explore the modes on offer and the overall impact of your work is guaranteed to improve.I'm looking this over, realizing that, eg. DrawPlus X4 provides all the Photoshop standards – darken, lighten, hard light and so on – as well as an erase option that drills down through all objects on the current layer. The biggest boost to creativity is the introduction of blend modes. Alternatively, if you’re using a mouse, you can apply and customise pressure profiles. There’s also now support for pressure-sensitive tablets in the Pressure Studio. The quality of all brushes has also been improved, particularly their onscreen display at high magnifications.

Here, the entire range of brushes from artistic watercolours and airbrushes through to photo-realistic objects and abstract effects has been overhauled and recategorised to make them easier to find. This is most apparent in DrawPlus’s excellent vector and bitmap-based brushes which can be used to create striking stroke, spray and edge effects. The emphasis on the technical side of illustration might make DrawPlus X4 sound a bit dull, but the program also has strong creative capabilities. There’s also a new Colour Palette Designer which automatically generates colour palettes based on your choice of base colour and colour harmony rules (monochrome, triad, complementary and so on).

The new Colour Picker tool lets you sample average colours rather than points and, if you drag rather than click, you can quickly pick up and apply gradients.

In terms of formatting power, DrawPlus offers good handling of tiling bitmaps, gradients and mesh fills, but the most important option remains simple flat colours.

Serif draw plus x4