Goooood morning everyone.
@sunnygirl85 Here are some art programs I have used below.
You can still buy
Adobe Photoshop without a monthly subscription. The backlash was huge when Adobe did that, so they brought back the way to just purchase it for $99. Just like the old days.
A good alternative to Adobe Illustrator and much cheaper ($40) is
Affinity Designer. It runs with extra beautiful programs if you have a Mac too. Everything Photoshop and Illustrator has but with a few unique quirks to their program. It is becoming an industry used product. This product will give you the closest experience to Illustrator and offers all the tools and many of their own. I definitely recommend this product as an Illustrator alternative. This program is so powerful and do so much. I use it as much as my Adobe products.... okay not as much.... but a lot. It’s suitably simple for beginners to use as a learning tool but sufficiently powerful for artists on a budget.
CorelDrawn/Paint/Editor is pretty good too, maybe a few steps down then with Adobe products. It doesn't have the same recognition, but they are trying and othering a ton of good content in it. Nice layout and a good amount of training videos if you want to learn how to use all it's features. It isn't nearly as powerful as Adobe or Affinity Designer, but it's good for beginners.
The following art programs are what people use when they want cheap with decent content in it, but they are not industry used at all.
Pixelmator is very sleek and minimalist in design and a good price. Powerful tools in it and as close to Photoshop and Illustrator as you can get. It has it's own minor quirks, but it is honestly recommended from me. You can't beat that price! ($30)
The most well known in this league would be
GIMP, though I've found the program to be quite clunky. It has a good support base and isn't as powerful as Photoshop, not even close, but you can do basic drawing and editing on it fairly well.
Pixlr does it's best to mimic Photoshop even in layout. It is online based and also free, but if your internet is down... well then you can't use it. But it is honestly the closest to Photoshop for a free program, and far more powerful then GIMP would ever want to be.
Seashore is another program and it is free! It works well for what it is and also has some powerful tools within it. It is based off GIMP, but personally I think they improved it. It is a better photo editor then anything, but you can still draw with it. Very clean and smooth design and runs really fast.
Autodesk is a nice program that runs in at $30. It is bitmap, so no vectoring. It lacks the polish and tools Illustrator and Affinity Designer has, but it has some good brush tools for varying projects.
Paint.net is a browser based program... but it's like MS Paint. It can do some basic stuff.
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