While it’s primarily known as a simple and free online photo editor, you can still use Pixlr X to create new drawings. All designs can be exported, printed, and shared on Facebook and/or Twitter. You can also find tutorials that will help you do things like re-create Google’s Android icon, designing a YouTube channel background image, making the Superman and Batman logos, and more. It’s backed by built-in lessons covering gradients, using paths, filters, and uploading images. The toolset appears minimalist at first until you click on the More Shapes button on the toolbar to reveal 28 other designs.Īt its heart, Vectr is great for creating business cards, typographic logos, posters, and other designs that don’t involve lots of detail. It has an extremely clean interface, with the layer stack listed on the left, your artboard seated in the center, and the settings for the objects you select on the artboard appearing on the right. This is another vector-based drawing tool you can download or use online for free.

All that-and with no monthly fee required. There are plenty of text and video-based tutorials out there, and you also have access to manuals and quick references, including information about keyboard shortcuts and command-line instructions. You can add layers, color fills, and even effects to your drawing such as blurs, bevels, shadows, textures, glows, and so on. Your basic toolset includes creating straight lines, freehand lines, shapes, 3D boxes, Bezier curves, spirals, and so much more. Just like Illustrator, Inkscape has everything a digital artist needs to create near-photo quality illustrations. It’s backed by an international community that can get you started, and will help with any problems you may encounter with the open-source software. Seventeen years later, it’s still a great free professional-grade alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape is likely the more widely used vector-based drawing software since its introduction in 2003.

Best stylus for note-takers and artists.

Adobe photoshop sketch