Among those of us of a certain age, it is likely that our first experience of a design program was with Windows Paint. That is where we made our first sketches, often childish doodles of no more than a few lines (I must admit that I never did particularly well with it), but those were our first steps.

Paint spawned a whole bunch of clones, like EZ Paint, which is what we’re talking about here. It is an alternative design app with a very similar interface to that of the original Microsoft program, but which has successfully extended its range of capacities.

More of everything, but not always better

The fact that EZ Paint offers more ways of achieving results with the mouse-drawn designs is, of course, very noteworthy. Shapes, textures and shading for the lines, fillings and lots of other stuff offer an interesting twist to an already very familiar concept. There is no doubt that the palette here is much broader.

Having said all that, it should also be pointed out that the program is not very user-friendly. I don’t mean the way you can draw or design, but rather the way you browse the menus. It is not always easy to find what you are looking for and, after going around in circles, it can take a while to finally get to where you want to be.

Features

• 60 interactive tools for creating illustrations.
• 35 drawing tools.
• 3 different paintbrushes, each with 100 different widths.
• Text and color selection tool.

Requirements and additional information:

• Minimum operating system requirements: Windows XP.