Artists once carried paints, canvases, tripods, easels, and differentsets of brushes into the great outdoors for painting. Some still do buta new breed of digital artists take their high-tech kit on the move.With Artweaver you can carry your artistic digital tools for use onyour netbook or notebook. Better still, you can carry this Photoshopequivalent on your pen drive. Artweaver is simple software that allowsyou to do creative digital painting with simulated tools and effects tocreate artistic but natural images.

Artweaver is a free graphical image editor and a digital painting program for Windows powered systems. It has flashy brushes and cool artistic effects to turn your work into a masterpiece. It can easily be accommodated on a flash drive so that you don’t need to even install it on your netbook or notebook.

Artweaver was developed by Boris Eyrich and you can download the portable version from here. The zip folder is 11.2MB and can be extracted directly to a flash drive and then you can run it from there.

Artweaver has a simple and easy to learn interface. It has a main window where editing is done, along with a Properties bar on the top. Palettes include the tools palette, brush palette, information palette, color palette and object palette, all arranged in the main interface. It also supports a wide range of image formats such as AWD (Artweaver), BMP, RLE, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD.

The tools palette has a lot of selection tools such as rectangular and elliptical selection tools, freehand, polygonal lasso, and magic wand tools. The Tool palette also has tools for different shapes along with some basic tools such as eraser, paint bucket, stamp, crop and move tools.

But the awesome collection of artistic brushes in Artweaver impressed me the most. It not only has common brushes like a standard brush, cloning brush and the airbrush, but it also has a complete set of artistic brushes such as acrylics, artistic, calligraphy, charcoal, oil pastels, distortion, chalk, felt pen, and impasto.

It also supports an impressive set of effects such as render, distort, sharpen, blur, texture, and many more to enhance the overall look of images. You can work on different layers and can modify opacity, grains, bleed, jitter and the angle of images. It also supports different languages. There are additional plug-ins to enhance the features. Artweaver recommends the use of a pen tablet to give you a more natural feel of actually painting and drawing.

With Artweaver on your USB flash drive, digital painting has really become mobile!