Pixarra rebranded its digital drawing Sketchbook program into the new TwistedBrush application and I don’t like it. The program claims that it is “one of the most versatile and powerful brush engines in existence packaged in into an easy to use program”. TwistedBrush has over 5,000 brush styles, with all the customization choices, but I much preferred Corel’s Painter. Looking up images that were created on the program, they seemed amateurish and didn’t have the same “fine art” look I found when I searched for Painter samples.

There is an upside, however. Pixarra offers a fifteen-day free trial and sells the whole package for $129, a much more affordable deal than some of the other programs available. It only works on Windows though, so if you’re a die-hard Mac user and don’t run Windows, you’re out of luck.

Pixarra also claims that TwistedBrush is a good photo editing and retouching software. Again, I think it’s mediocre at best.

Functionality and User Friendliness:

Although it’s a standalone program, TwistedBrush has a sense of familiarity when you open it up, probably because a lot of the tools and features have been borrowed from more popular programs. But, a downside to TwistedBrush is that it seems to consume a lot of your computer’s resources (read: runs slow) when compared to the other programs I’ve written about and used in the past.

The Bottom Line:

When reviewing the program, I skipped the “features” section because I couldn’t really find any worth writing about. If you’re a Pixarra TwistedBrush user and you absolutely love this program, please tell me why. If you’re looking for a program to play around with some digital drawing, have some of the “real digital” effects, and do some photo retouching, this is a good buy for beginners because its much cheaper than Corel Painter.

Final Mentions:  

The cartoon and manga (anime) creations I saw from users of TwistedBrush were quite good. If that’s what you’re into, this would be a good choice for you. Definitely DON’T buy this program as a photo-editing tool, there are better, less pricey applications for that. (Adobe Elements, for example).