It’s that time again, the weekly Friday Review, and for this article we are showing off a great little application for sketching and digital painting—Art Rage 2.Art Rage (now 2.5) from Ambient Design is a program that will appeal to the artist within you, whether you have a BA in Fine Art or just like to paint in your spare time, you should check out the amazingly quick and effortless workflow that Art Rage offers.As you can see, the user interface (UI) is laid out with a focus on reducing clutter and only presents to you the essential tools that you need to work, specifically the brush/medium, navigation, color palette and menu toolbars. The UI is very well implemented and it’s easy to hide any panel by clicking a green tab which then slides it away into the corner or side. You can alternately hide all the windows by hitting Tab. When doing this, you’ll spot the nice little graphical animation touches this program has, the windows slide away subtly one after the other in a cascading fashion that does not distract but unconsciously breathes life into the application. In fact, opening and closing any other panel, saving work, creating new layers and zooming in/out all give the feeling of finesse thanks to the smooth animations. The Mac and PC version both offer the same interface and so it is a pleasant surprise for Windows users to be using such an elegant program.A quick dab around with the paint brush and you suddenly realize that you may not want to return to Photoshop for your digital painting needs. The brushes are very expressive and offer options to reduce the consistency of the paint via thinners or the pressure with which you apply strokes. You can also specify how much paint you desire per stroke with the load slider but the special and clever functionality that makes mark-making a joy is the way the brush orientation will rotate around depending on the direction you are moving the mouse or tablet stylus in. This is a crucial thing that has been left out from the other graphics and painting application. Imagine in real life you are holding a brush and you are making strokes, you do not hold the brush in one direction all the time and due to the nature of the brushes themselves, they trail behind as you apply more pressure. This clever feature of Art Rage is what makes the brush strokes so convincing.If you do not have a graphic tablet and stylus then do not worry because the strokes respond as much to the direction and speed you are moving at as to the added pressure/angle abilities that tablets offer. This in combination with some clever smoothing of the characteristic “jitter” that mouse movements tend to elicit means for a speedy and fun painting and drawing process with either mouse or tablet. To illustrate that point, here is a quick animation of a sketchy doodle I made in just under 20 minutes with just the mouse.There is also a faux 3D texture for many of the brushes which can look a little cheesy but if you tone this down via the brush settings it starts to look very realistic and indeed, like a real life painting. This is complemented by the very realistic way that the paints and materials blend into each other. Indeed, there is even a palette knife tool that does not generate any of it’s own paint but rather serves as a way to manipulate the existing marks you made so you can scrape paint about and chuckle with glee as you see the colors blend into each other. Art Rage definitely has its targets set on being the ultimate painting emulation program and offers further features such as the ability to choose the type and grain of the surface you want to paint onto. This underlying texture emulating a real canvas or paper is a welcome contribution.There are more features such as layers and being able to load a reference image, but the ability I have the most fun with is the “Load Tracing Image” option. Again, very clever implementation, you can load any image of your choice and then the color palette switches to “automatic mode”—meaning that at whatever point you hover the cursor over the image, when you click and drag, that is the color that the brush uses until you release the mouse button or lift the stylus from the tablet surface. When you move and click again, it automatically takes that color for your next stroke. This in effect allows you to very quickly trace an image and create an expressively painted layer on top of the original image. Of course, you could use Photoshop and its filters for this purpose but the results always look like…well…an image processed with Photoshop Filters. Instead, albeit with some extra time and care, you can get a uniquely painted image duplication of say a photo for very little effort.Here is a picture of my friend David playing golf, with an extremely quick Art Rage “do” on top to illustrate the potential for artistic expression.Think Dave looks Okay? Perhaps you can do better? There is a free version of Art Rage available from their site.The last point to really drill it home is the price on Amazon. Art Rage, for $50 USD, there’s no reason at all not to add this program to your Dock or Start Menu. Get painting, have fun!