1. Free Paint Software For Mac

Apr 10, 2020  MediBang Paint is a simple to use, yet incredibly powerful tool that works great for novices and veteran illustrators alike. Similar to Krita, the software is more geared towards comic book artists but it can be used for sketching as well. As you might have guessed, there are a bunch of different tools to create intricate graphics.

Top 12 Best Free Drawing Softwares

Are your looking for the best free drawing software to create amazing paintings on your PC with a stylus, mouse, or touchscreen? Choose one of the following digital art softwares to do a realistic simulation of grunge effect, watercolors, oils, pastels, charcoal, etc.

1. Paint.NET

Updated version of standard Windows Paint for drawing

• Convenient and simple to use
• Lots of functions and effects
• The interface is well-organized
• Online support and useful tutorials

• Brushwork is limited
• Burn&Dodge isn’t available
• You can’t correct text after applying other effects

As well as the name, the program’s interface resembles a standard drawing tool integrated into the operating system. But in terms of functionality, Paint.NET is far ahead. This free digital art software perfectly copes with the task of drawing volumetric models, moving objects, and transparent structures.

Because of its simplicity, Paint.NET is perfect for aspiring artists. Besides, it can work quickly even on low-powered devices. Paint.NET supports layers and has a large number of effects. There are tools for blurring, styling, sharpening, and noise reduction. If you wish, the program features can be expanded using plug-ins. Additionally, this free paint program allows you to get images from the scanner and enhance it.

2. GIMP

Top-quality open source drawing software with free plug-ins

• Graphics Tablet Support
• Individual file storage format “.xcf” to store texts, textures, layers
• Ability to open PSD files
• Create plug-ins

• GIMP is a bit difficult
• The UI is not well-organized
• There are fewer features compared to paid analogs

This is a powerful, flexible, customizable open-source raster picture editor.

This free painting software has a large number of tools that are available in Photoshop: layers, masks, color grading, smart selection, brushes, filters, and tons of other features. The other tools can be added by using third-party extensions. However, the interface and hotkeys are peculiar here. If you're used to Photoshop, you'll have to relearn.

• Check out the best Wacom tablet.

Initially, this product was created as a free alternative to Photoshop. However, the functionality of the application allows you to create drawings from scratch. This best free drawing software includes different “soft” and “hard” brushes with variable features, the possibility of layer-by-layer drawing processing, smoothing and other effects, as well as a large number of additional tools.

3. Corel Painter

Completely free drawing software for professional digital drawing

• Constant updates
• Dozens of tools that imitate real drawing
• User-friendly interface

• An upgrade is a bit expensive
• Difficult to understand

Corel Painter is a program originally created for painting. Its functionality does not provide the solution of a wide range of problems, and this is not a universal program at all. However, for digital drawing needs, Corel Painter is well-developed. This drawing software will provide you with an impressive array of professional artist tools. Brushes, oil palettes, watercolor palettes, various paper textures are available for you.

The digital drawing software imitates not only the result of applying a particular tool, but also the process of working with it. When using a pencil, the line thickness will directly depend on the angle of the stylus towards the screen of your tablet. A brush that has just been dipped in the paint will leave a wider and more saturated mark than a brush that has been painting for some time.

4. Krita

• Up-to-date UI with a nice layout
• Improved OpenGL
• Many brushes
• Layers are available
• HDR is supported

• Lacks image retouching tools
• After updating you may have lags
• Inconvenient text tool

Many professionals prefer this program. The application doesn’t limit the size of the virtual canvas. It depends on the performance of your PC. Krita imitates real canvases, emulates various drawing tools, and the effects container includes many artistic effects. Therefore, the process of creating digital drawings is as realistic as possible. Besides, this free digital art software works smoothly with layers, contains tools for drawing post-processing and provides a high level of detail.

• Read more how to fix Wacom tablet lagging.

It is interesting that initially Krita was developed as a drawing tool, but now the program can boast of many additional functions for editing ready-made digital pictures and can be considered as a competitor of Adobe Photoshop.

5. Mischief

• Free version was updated
• The price of the paid version is lower now
• Unlimited canvas
• Decent interface
• Many brushes

• Lacks nice standard brushes

The new version of the application for drawing has unlimited canvas and cool brushes that can be scaled. The UI is now panel-based and its elements are located across the screen. Because of a smaller large number of tools, this free painting software provides you with a larger canvas.

One of the advantages of this program is the ability to get an image with broadly sketched parts and, at the same time, well-detailed other areas.

In general, the new version of this free paint program is a worthy continuation of the previous ones. You can stretch the canvas to the desired size. You can also zoom in. Among the new features, I would mention multi-touch support, extra docks for brushes, trackpad support for Macs, and two new custom swatch color palettes.

6. MyPaint

• Works on all platforms
• Many special features
• A great free option for manga and anime artists

• The undo feature could be faster
• Some problems with the GUI when choosing brushes
• Sharp Lines are not smooth enough

The graphic editor is focused on beginning artists. This is one of the best free drawing programs that has a simple interface along with unlimited canvas sizes. This software allows you to immerse in the process of painting, removing all additional panels and settings from the program’s desktop. The application offers the chance to select brushes. All of them are divided into three sections: “Classic”, “Experimental”, and “Favorite”. In addition, MyPaint contains an interesting tool called “Notepad”. This is a kind of draft where you can try how different brushes paint.

7. Clip Studio Paint

• Brushes can be customized
• Excellent vector tools
• Great coloring options
• User base and community are large
• Many assets for free downloading

• Text tools don’t impress
• No audio support for animation
• Interface is confusing

This is one of the most popular professional drawing apps for PC. The program was designed to create illustrations, animations, manga, and comics. Currently, over 4 million people use this app.

Many professional artists and illustrators prefer Clip Studio Paint as it provides superior flexibility and freedom. When creating manga or comics, you can do the same things as on paper. However, you have more advantages thanks to digital technology. The program has a huge selection of great drawing tools. The updated version also includes animation features, which makes her one of the best free art programs.

This program can be considered a worthy competitor to classic Photoshop. Now, many artists opt for Clip Studio Paint since it is more universal in many aspects.

8. Microsoft Paint 3D

• 3D image creation and editing is very easy
• It is possible to share 3D images online
• The creation process can be played back

• 2D objects can’t be extruded
• No 3D captures mobile app
• Lacks standard picture editing tools

If you use Windows 10, Paint 3D is built into your system by default. If this is not your case, you can download Paint 3D from the Microsoft app store for free following this link. Using this free art software, you can accomplish three main tasks: create your own three-dimensional object, place it in the composition and make it animated. Creating and working with primitive three-dimensional objects in Paint 3D is very simple. Select the desired object on the list on the right side of the screen, for example, a cone. Left-clicking on the canvas, you create this shape. As soon as you release the left mouse button, a box consisting of four adjustment rings will appear around the object. Three of them will direct the cone in space. The fourth, located in the upper left corner, will move the object closer or further away from you.

9. Artweaver Free

• Many creative brushes
• You can automate the work using scripts
• Small installation file size (less than 20MB)
• Creative painting tools

• Poor work with text
• Problematic drawing with the stamp tool

Some users call this free paint program as an analog of Corel Painter, while others claim that Artweaver is close in functionality to the fifth version of Photoshop. Anyway, Artweaver allows you to perform most standard photo-editing operations efficiently. It far surpasses the built-in editors of graphic viewers.

A user is offered a rich set of various brushes (chalk, charcoal, pencil, acrylic fibers, sponge, oil). There is the ability to work with layers, import and export graphics in various formats. Artweaver also has all kinds of filters that can be used while editing drawings (wind effect, blur, waves, granulation, oil effect, etc.). Moreover, this best free drawing software has the feature to draw textures. Artweaver also has Plugins Pack that contains many additional filters.

10. PixBuilder Studio

• Primitives are available
• Text can be corrected
• Multi-layer select
• Layers can be grouped

• You can’t edit text in-place
• Lack of color swatches
• It’s impossible to delete outlines from primitive

PixBuilderStudio is painting software for Windows that allows you to perform all the basic operations including correction, processing, and creating images. We can’t compare the program with full-fledged commercial editors, but it competes on equal terms with popular Paint.net and StylePix.

The program interface is clear and convenient. It fully complies with the requirements for programs of this kind. It has a large selection of tools for work with colors, manipulating layers, applying various effects. By the way, this paint software supports plug-ins for Photoshop. Perhaps not all, but most plug-ins should work in the program.

11. Gravit

• Easy and understandable interface
• It is possible to re-use the same element several times
• Sketch files are supported

• Sometimes lags
• The overall functionality is rough around the edges
• The Sketch import works poorly

Gravit is a graphics editor that has both an online version and desktop applications for all major platforms. This digital painting software has a complete set of tools necessary for work with vector graphics. The application supports curves, layers, geometric shapes, various selection and transformation tools, texts and many other functions for manipulating objects.

Gravit can also be used as a raster graphics editor. There are such functions as cropping, masks, blending, resizing, and adding filters. It is very useful when designing interfaces, creating layouts for web pages and printing products. In addition, the program has access to a huge library of vector objects that can be used in your work for free.

12. MediBang Paint Pro

• Very simple interface
• Many patterns and brushes
• Supports various input modes

• Some annoying advertising when you open the program

This is a specialized tool that will appeal to those, who create comics, anime, and manga. The application is very simple, fast and at the same time absolutely free. MediBang Paint Pro library has over 800 pre-installed backgrounds and anime-themed templates. Besides, there are about 50 brushes and a big choice of free fonts. I like that there is a built-in cloud where you can upload your works for free and not litter the space on your computer. MediBang also works great with .PSD files, which is non-typical for free paint programs.

Ann Young

Hi there, I'm Ann Young - a professional blogger, read more

So when I first made the switch from Windows to macOS a few years back, one of the gripes I had and can imagine many other people having too is the absence of a stand-alone basic graphics or painting utility application. While Apple kind of pioneered such apps on personal computers with their Macintoshes shipping with MacPaint, the scenario has been quite different since the last 3 decades with MacPaint seeing its last release in 1988. Today we take a look at 5 different paint app for mac; whether you are someone who has been missing MS Paint on Mac OS or just looking for a basic painting app, this list is for you.

Read: Top 5 Free Online Image Editor Like Photoshop

Microsoft Paint for Mac

1. Preview

Before even hopping on and suggesting a bunch of third-party apps, I wanted to shine some light on one of the most underused and under-rated native apps on Mac OS: Preview. While I was on the hunt for a paint app, Preview managed to seriously surprise me with its capabilities.

To get started, open Preview and open up the image you want to edit or simply open the image with Preview directly. Next show the Markup Toolbar by the clicking the icon shown below.

Read: Use Mac’s Preview App like a Pro with These Tips & Tricks

You can now find a whole host of editing options from simple sketching and drawing to insertion of various shapes and text and even adjusting image parameters like exposure, contrast, sharpness and a lot more. You also get the ability of adding a signature or signing your PDFs from Preview itself, image size formatting and text formatting options.

Although Preview has a lot to offer, it may not be the perfect replacement for some as it does not allow you to create new image files which is its biggest setback.

Quick Tip: Be sure to first make a copy of your image before editing with Preview, as it automatically saves all your changes and it could be really hard to revert back if you have already saved the image.

Free Paint Software For Mac

2. Paint Brush

Paint Brush for Mac OS is like the perfect replica of MS paint. The app is quite bare bones and extremely easy to use, offering just the basic functions of a paint application.

Unlike Preview, in this app you can create a new document and this is the first thing you are greeted with, on opening the application and you can state the size of your canvas. It offers all the basic functionalities just as MS paint like pencil, colour fill, shapes, text, magnification and also a colour picker tool which comes in very handy. It also supports most image formats including JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and GIF.

Paint Brush is also very fast to open and get work done with and will be perfect for doing some small editing or painting stuff in a jiffy.

Price: Free

Link: Download Paintbrush from here

3. Seashore

Seashore is a free, open-source paint application for Mac OS built entirely in Cocoa. While the UI might seem a little dated, the app has a lot of tricks up its sleeves which makes it an upgrade to Preview or Paint Brush.
SeaShore introduces the concept of layers, just like you have in Photoshop. The layers work like sheets of acetate stacked upon each other and the transparent areas allow you to see through to the underbidding layers. This allows you to create different layers for different effects and adjusting the effects separately or deleting them separately, thus providing easy management.

Seashore has a nifty gradient tool where you can specify the direction and strength of the gradient. Some other features include alpha channel editing, texts with sub pixel rendering and textures.

Read: 10 Best Ways to Open and Edit PSD files without Photoshop

Quick Tip: Another free and open source alternative is Pinta, which is also cross platform and an exact clone of Paint.NET on Windows.

Price: Free

Link: Download Seashore from here

4. MS Paint using Wine or Play On Mac

If you didn’t know, Wine is an awesome and efficient way to run native Windows applications on your Mac and the best part about it is that unlike Bootcamp or VM installations, it does not require a windows license and does not add that overhead.

The setup process can be a little tedious, but it is definitely rewarding as you can run most of your Windows apps on your Mac. Play On Mac is a third party tool built on Wine, which we recommend for installing Windows applications on Mac OS. Just download Play On Mac and all the dependencies required for Wine and then you should be able to install any Windows app of your choice. To install Paint, go to Install Apps > Graphics > Paint and hit download. MS Paint should be installed on your computer and it works just as good on any Windows PC.

Quick Tip: Although Wine is much less intensive or involving than Bootcamp or a virtual machine running Windows, it still takes up a lot of space with its dependencies and adds overhead. So we recommend this method if you are someone who is planning on using more Windows apps on your Mac or just cannot do without MS Paint.

Price: Free

Link: Download Play On Mac from here

5. Pixelmator

While MS Paint is mostly about simplicity, it doesn’t hurt to include a feature packed app for all the power users out there. As I said, by no means should Pixelmator be considered a basic app as it is far from that, having a boatload of options, effects and features.

Pixelmator also offers layers with the option of layer styles presets where you can either use a predefined preset or save your own custom style preset. It also has retouching tools, colour correction tools and a real-time effects machine along with all the drawing and brushing tools. It even sports iCloud support and the ability to publish your pictures directly to social media.

What makes Pixelmator stand out from all the other professional graphic utility apps, is its flexibility; while it does have a lot of features, one can also just use the brush or pencil tools to doodle anything just as they would in any other paint app. The app is not at all overwhelming even for a beginner and strikes a perfect balance between simplicity and productivity. If you do not mind spending $30, Pixelmator is a keeper.

Price: $29.99

Link: Get Pixelmator on the App Store

Wrapping Up: Microsoft Paint for Mac

Mac OS doesn’t come with any paint app but that doesn’t mean that there is a dearth of paint apps on Mac and it is quite the opposite. But before downloading any third party app, we highly recommend checking out Preview and checking whether it fulfills all your needs or not. Paint Brush is an awesome simple and easy to use paint application while Seashore is slightly more complex with the addition of layers.

Pixelmator is one heck of an app with all its features, but it is very flexible and you can use it as an MS paint replacement to a cheaper Photoshop alternative. And last but not least, if you need to use a lot of Windows apps, Wine is your best bet to get MS paint running on your Mac. So this was our list of the Microsoft Paint for Mac. Which one do you use daily or did we miss yours? Let us know in the comments below.