OpenCanvas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The correct title of this article is openCanvas. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

openCanvas, popularly abbreviated as oC, is an art program for Microsoft Windows popular among Japanese digital artists. Portalgraphics, the company that created it, originally released it as freeware, but moved to a demo/retail model starting with version 2.

openCanvas is known for its unique blending style, something of a cross between Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. Unlike many similar programs, openCanvas is specifically designed for use with pressure-sensitive drawing tablets, like the popular Wacom's digitizing tablets. It is designed from the bottom up to be a sketch program rather than a graphic design program.

While it does not compete in larger markets and lacks many of the graphic design features of (much more expensive) programs like Adobe Photoshop, it has quite a community following and is known for producing quite astounding work for its small footprint.

Perhaps most important of all is one feature which makes it stand apart from its competition: the ability to save sketches as an event file, a recording of the strokes of the artist, and replay them or export as a movie.

Up until the last free version, 1.1-b72, openCanvas also included network support, allowing artists to collaborate in real-time over the internet, using different layers of the same drawing. This feature was removed on the release of version 2.

openCanvas is currently available in English (v4) and Japanese (v4.5).