Painting software custom-built for serious artists

Why not try the original, time-tested, digital painting software built by artists, for artists? Our virtual art studio has exceeded the creative expectations of illustrators, concept, fine, photo and manga artists for over 28 years!

Make a natural transition from traditional to digital

Sketch, paint, and create digital artwork with Painter 2020. Explore digital brushes and painting tools to develop illustrations and original artwork.

An unparalleled photo art experience: Let the intuitive tools within Painter guide you through the transformation from a photo to a painted masterpiece. Rapidly paint a photo using the technology of SmartStroke Auto-Painting. Or grab a brush and hand paint the canvas using your photo as a clone source, while Painter magically pulls the photo colors through the bristles. Whatever your approach, the result will be momentous.
Vast amounts of brushes and customization capabilities: Unleash your creativity with 900+ brushes! Create with Painter’s revered traditional media and experience proprietary Dab Stencils, Dynamic Speckles, Particles and Pattern Pens brushes, plus so much more. Bring that extra special something to your artwork. Don’t stop there! You can also import brushes from other artists and create your own brush variations that produce a singular result.
Time-saving performance: Painter will keep up with every brushstroke, saving you valuable time! The Brush Accelerator utility scores your system and automatically applies the optimal Painter performance settings allowing GPU and CPU to ensure Painter can move at lightning speed. Benefit from the bonus functionality that tells you how to strategically upgrade your system to further improve Painter’s performance.

Painter 2020: Brushes

Check out the brush categories that make Painter stand apart from other painting software!

Brushes: You’ve never experienced such blazing brushes. Test out the Fast Simple and Ornate categories to assess Painter’s performance enhancements and check out new Watercolor and Digital Watercolor variants.
Artists Favorites: These brush variants are so popular we created a special category to highlight them. Sargent is an everlasting expressive favorite.
Blenders: Painter’s superior blending capabilities are highlighted in this category, with Just add water being a cherished finishing brush.
Dab Stencils: Imagine knocking out areas of a brush so that the selected choice of media, including papers, flow maps, and textures, take center stage.
Natural Media Library: We narrowed down the beloved, true-to-traditional, brushes into an easy-to-access brush library to save you experimentation time.
Particles: These physics-inspired brushes spring, flow, glow and gravitate onto the canvas, offering an infinite number of creative possibilities.
Pattern Pens: These unique brushes produce visionary strokes that incorporate exciting patterns for a one-of-a-kind end result.
Thick Paint: Paint with revolutionary, voluminous media you can pile up, push around, carve into, scrape, and blend to painted perfection.
Texture Brushes: Paint with stunning 2.5D texture brushes that cover or blend with a source image extruding strokes off the canvas.

Painter 2020: Tools & Media

Use a combination of amazing tools and media to craft the perfect composition

Color Harmonies: Six new color harmonies can be saved as color sets, plus universal color selection advancements throughout Painter make color selection a breeze.
Layer Workflow: Improvements to the contextual and high-level menus save time and workflow tweaks to collapsing, locking, selecting and pasting improve layer quality and responsiveness.
Divine Proportion and Layout Grid: Use guides and grids based on classical composition, creating a sense of proportion that guides the eye of the viewer across a painting.
Perspective Guides: Display non-printing Perspective Guides to create objects that give the impression that they are receding, or vanishing, from view.
Mirror Painting and Kaleidoscope: Easily create a symmetrical painting by allowing Painter to create a mirror image by reproducing brushstrokes on the opposite side of the canvas or multiple reflections of mirror planes.
Surface Texture: When finalizing your painting it might help to add touches such as exhibiting paper texture, emphasizing 3D brushstrokes or applying directional lighting.
Papers: Choose from a library of included canvas Paper textures. Adjust, import or create your own and either cover or reveal texture using a variety of media types.
Flow Maps: Flow maps are textures designed to maximize the creative potential of the Real Watercolor and Particle brushes by helping direct the flow of paint.
Textures: Integrate intricate surface texture into your projects by selectively painting or filling portions of the canvas. Use Texture Synthesis to automatically generate a larger texture for you.

Painter 2020: Performance

A painting environment that puts the focus on your art

Automatic Performance Optimization: The Brush Accelerator scores your system and applies the optimal Painter performance settings, which automatically allows the GPU and CPU to ensure Painter is lightning fast.
Interface advancements: Revamped property bars, flyouts and palettes for brushes and tools put the most important controls at your fingertips, and consolidated Library Panels save precious painting pixels.
Brush Tracking: The pressure of your stylus on a tablet determines the density and width of your strokes. Each artist uses a different pressure level and you can adjust Painter to match with Brush Tracking!
Customizable User Interface: Customize brushes, media content, palettes, shortcut keys and more to set up the perfect work environment. Plus, import content from others to complete your toolset.
Learning Content: Improve your painting performance by taking time to learn. Our Discovery Center is a one-stop shop for video tutorials, tips, webinar registration, contest entrance, gallery uploads and more!
Photoshop Compatibility: Many Painter artists use Photoshop to edit imagery while turning to Painter to add artistic brushstrokes. Open layered .PSD files in Painter and save back out to Photoshop.
Windows Multi-touch: Experience the intuitive way to simultaneously pan, zoom and smoothly rotate your canvas using two fingers on a Windows touch device. To reset your painting view simply double-tap with two fingers.
Wacom Pen Computer: When painting with a Wacom pressure sensitive device, Painter’s brushes automatically react to pressure, tilt and bearing plus you can use the Art Pen for full rotation.