What was your first art program?

[sorrowshowers]

My first program was MSPaint.. yes, generic I know... but I remember drawing MLP on my grandma's old PC when I was a kid. I'm so sad I can't retrieve any of my old art from that era...  I drew traditionally for a while, but if I remember correctly the first program I picked up as a young teen was Fire Alpaca. And the rest was history!

[sunnyp4rk]

Medibang was the first serious art program I used. Now I currently use Clip Studio Paint, since I wanted to use other people's brushes lol

[lucky]

I started off drawing directly in Scratch bitmap editor with my grandparents trackball mouse ages ago. Not quite sure if that counts, though. It's not technically an art program.

A few years later I got my own Macbook and a hand me down Wacom Bamboo (that I still use to this day) and downloaded Autodesk Sketchbook, either off the built in appstore or the internet. That was my first "real" program.

Funnily enough, these days I tend to opt for programs that most people start off with and graduate from. I switch between TuxPaint, MS Paint, and Fire Alpaca. Very rarely do I use anything professional even though it's within my power. I prefer the unpolished and nostalgic feel of these programs by far.

[rnottelovesowls]

alright, here goes. sing along if you know the words:

kid pix, kid pix! come on and play with kid pix!
"green is my favorite!"
now grab your wacky brush, kid pix!

BOOM "wooooooow!"

[verook]

Hmmmm, If I remember correctly... PaintTool SAI.
My ex gilfriend recommended it to me in the seventh grade, she used to do South Park speedpaints lol 
It was really helpful and fun to learn, then I replaced it with drawpile.

Don't judge my decisions 

[Slix]

Pretty sure it was KidPix of some variety on the family Mac. I know I played around with KidPix Studio Deluxe at some point, but I don't know if that was actually the first or not. Occasionally I still like to go back to KidPix on some of my older Macs just for fun!

Later on I tried out Photoshop since my dad had an academic install, but I didn't use it a ton as a kid. I got into Pixelmator in middle school because my dad got it shortly after release, and I've been a Pixelmator guy since then! Around that same time I think I also used a Mac app that was installed on my dad's work laptop called Comic Life which was pretty neat!

[Corrupted Unicorn]

  Magic. 
Artist.     
          Deluxe.           

( Disney Magic artist deluxe! Let's play Part 1! No Commentary! - Leo Angle )

A.K.A. Disney's Kidpix  Ok, fair, I had some brush-ups (HAH) with the humble MSPaint early too, but M.A.D. has a very special spot in my heart. I have all the sounds when you hover over the tools memorized. And when you use them too. I never got to do anything worth it with the program but when I was a kid I loved to put this on the computer with my cousins and making Camp Lazlo comics and "slapping" characters with the fish brush, and drawing a Homer with a big open mouth and "feeding" him Mickey Mouse gummies  I made one of my cousins spit his drink at the screen out of laughter with the last one     

It was a time of nothing but joyous artistic freedom 

My only flaw with it is the "animation" tool, which was just putting Mickey & Friends animated GIFs over pre-made backgrounds, and everything felt... too tailor-made, too ready. "Here's a Wild West city background and here's a set of stickers of Mickey & Friends as cowboys, and a dancing cactus". It didn't jolt my imagination as the painting side did. Oddly enough, a previous version (I think it's Magic Artist Studio) had some rudimentary animation tools that let you, you know, actually draw the things you're going to animate. It even has a rudimentary inbetweening tool! How cool is that!

Since we got so many new users, I'd like to take a moment to crosspromote the Unconventional Art Software topic: if you feel like giving wacky and obscure art programs a try, we're trying to compile them all here! And if you find any missing, post it there so we can add it! 

[LucaDoodleDoo]

For digital art, my very first art program was Microsoft Paint (back before it had all these fancy features that it does today). I started doing pixel art, learning how to edit game sprites. After that, I moved to Photoshop Elements 4.0 when I got my first art tablet.

[candycanearter07]

Technically TuxPaint or Flipnote Studio, but the first one I took more seriously was Adobe Flash CS5 (in like 2020).

[CaptainAndrew]

So, my first art program was GIMP (which I still use) , on my own computer. I originally used it to practice photo editing without using Photoshop (even pirated ones; straight to its nearest free-from-the-box alternative), but 3 years ago I began pure illustrated art creation once I realized that you can DRAW in it. I still use it today. I still use it to this day for illustrating. Here is my GIMP gallery if you want to see my quality of art: https://pancontinental.nekoweb.org/art/gimp

I am by no means a professional, clearly. Bear with me.

[dogbrain]

mine was framecast! if you know what i'm talking about, i sincerely apologize.......

in case you're not aware (which you almost assuredly aren't, unless you too were an animation meme/furry/undertale kid with unrestricted internet access), it was a drawing/animation program and a social media platform all in one. you could make animations in the charmingly shitty mspaint-esque drawing interface and share them, and it was the first real online presence i ever had as well as the first art program i consistently used. it was buggy and awful and constantly crashed but god damn it if i didn't get my start with digital art and meet some of my best closest friends there!!!!

it shut down in 2021 because the guy who ran it turned it into a shill for NFTs (which obviously aged like milk). he made basically zero effort to archive the hundreds of thousands of arts and animations that were shared in its more-than-a-decade-long lifespan, so everything not saved by the users themselves is essentially lost media. i'm STILL mad about it to this day

(by the way, if you ever came across a person with the username EchoCookieCat with a heart at the end..... that was me LMAOOAOO i wanna know where my melonland fc veterans are. there's a nonzero chance we roleplayed warrior cats in ye days of olde)

[nexxlyte]

ms paint! then i got my first drawing tablet and now i just been using paint tool sai for the past two decades now XD