Beginner painting software for Windows

Digital art made simple
Interested in digital art? Enjoy all the versatility of Painter® Essentials™ 8, the fun and uncomplicated painting software for beginners that will inspire you to experiment and fall in love with digital painting.

Blank Canvas
Paint from a blank canvas using a curated collection of artist-created brushes.

Photo Art
Create amazing photo art using AI, Auto-Painting or Paint by hand.

Brushes
Enhance your paintings with outrageously creative brush packs.

Everything you need to get started with digital art

Intuitive user interface
Brushes, adjustment tools and built-in learning are easily accessible through the UI so you can focus on your art.

Amazing brushes
Craft your masterpiece with stunning reality using renowned dry, wet, and blending media.

Simple photo art and tracing
Transform any image using powerful AI, Auto-Painting, Cloning and Tracing Paper.

Convenient color selection
Select color your way. Use the Color Wheel, Mixer, Color Sets and Harmonies.

Valuable symmetry tools
Paint in perfect symmetry with Mirror Painting and create beautiful Mandalas using the Kaleidoscope tool.

Incredible speed
Essentials can easily manage large canvases, scrubby zooming, rotating, large brushes and up to 4x’s faster Sargent brushes.

Artist-trusted brushes!
From traditional to uniquely Painter, every brush in Essentials was custom selected for new digital artists from our professional Painter art studio.

Compatibility

Photoshop
Preserve colors and layers with ease when transferring files between Photoshop and Painter Essentials

Drawing tablet
Support for stylus tilt, rotation, bearing and pressure control creates the most natural painting experience

Mac/PC
Whether you’re a Mac or PC person we support both platforms with perpetual licensing

Essentials was created to provide the ideal paint software for beginners to ease into digital art
Blank canvas
Sketch, draw, render and paint whatever you dream up or are inspired by.

Photo art
Produce incredible photo art with ease using AI, Auto-Painting and cloning tools.

NEW and ENHANCED
Painting tools
Launch the new Drawing and Painting Layout from the Welcome Screen to set up the UI with optimal tools for creating from scratch. Begin your painting by experimenting with 23 new brushes and many with enhanced smoothing for buttery strokes that react to stylus tilt and bearing.

Color options
Easily narrow down the perfect painting colors by using the new harmonies and color sets. The harmonies include complementary, light monochromatic and dark monochromatic color options that dynamically create balanced color swatches from your chosen color.

Artificial Intelligence
AI Auto-painting presets have added powerful new algorithms to provide richer, more natural looking results for portraits, still life and landscape type paintings from imagery. Choose from 10 new AI Styles to experience auto-painting with stunning artistic results.

Document and layer control
Choose to create a landscape or portrait-oriented document right from the New Image dialog. While working with layers, the improved contextual menus, information dialogs, layer adjuster options and easy access to commands will greatly improve ease of use.

Apple support
Improve your overall Mac workflow in big ways!

New
Touch Bar Support
On MacBook Pro and iPad, increase efficiency with new support for the Touch Bar that offers context-sensitive controls that change depending on the selected tool.

ENHANCED
Multi-touch Trackpad support
Responsive multi-touch Trackpad support allows you to perform useful actions by swiping and pinching, or spreading your thumb and forefinger on your trackpad.

New
Sidecar Support
Use Sidecar on macOS to use your iPad as a secondary display that mirrors your Mac desktop. The Painter Essentials UI will auto-adjust based on the resolution of your iPad.

NEW
Apple Pencil Tilt
With new tilt support for Apple Pencil, you can now tilt the selected brush while you paint to precisely control the shape of the brushstroke while using Sidecar.

New
Apple Artificial Intelligence
Enjoy AI Auto-Painting presets that leverage Core ML and the powerful new Apple Vision Framework technology to determine areas of focus in a photo and intelligently paint details generating natural-looking paintings with a greater sense of depth and focus. By painting with more detail in the areas of interest, and using larger more gestural strokes in the background, the results more closely resemble what a trained artist can achieve. Choose from 10 new AI Styles to experience auto-painting with stunning artistic results on the Mac.