What was your first art program?

[Kutan]

Was it something aimed at kids, or did you go straight to a program for professionals? Was it on PC, or was it something you downloaded on mobile? I'm curious to hear!

My very first was Kid Pix, and I imagine a couple other people will have grown up with that too; it was really popular. Alongside that, I had Flying Colors, which I adored as kid. It was marketed around its outrageous color cycling effects, which pleasantly tickles a part of my brain in a way that I'm still susceptible to today. Oooh, shiny!

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I figure all that stuff is on tablet now, and it's probably a thousand times easier to use! I had one of those clunky drawing tablets that plugged into the TV, and it was kinda cool, but I would have been way happier with an iPad



What about everyone else?

[Guest]

When we are strictly talking about graphics editors, like, properly, then I started off with paint dot net, and eventually moved to GIMP where I am comfortable to this day.

But if we're counting art programs I had on disk as a kid:
Kai's Power Goo was a silly image distortion program mainly for fun.


Disney's Kreativstudio was a playful, German Disney themed stamp/art maker and drawing program that unfortunately has some very strong phobia triggers inbuilt, which is why I cracked the disk and threw it away.

[DoctorDizzy]

I think that my very first art program was FireAlpaca...? I suppose there could have been things from my early childhood that I don't remember, but FireAlpaca was the first digital art program that I used once I started actually drawing. I still hold it in pretty high regard, even though the ads can get kinda annoying! :omg:k: I've since moved to Clip Studio Paint, and while I've tried other art programs, CSP is the one for me, I think.

[plantovision]

My very first was Kid Pix, and I imagine a couple other people will have grown up with that too;

Undo Guy from KidPix was the greatest thing to ever grace my eyes back in Elementary School.

Undo! Undo! - Oh no - My bad! - Now wait a minute! - I made a boo boo, yeah! - No way! - Oops! - No no no! - Whoops!

[Guest]

Creative Writer. It came with my parents' Windows 95 computer. It's not really much of an art program, since it was just a bunch of clipart and fonts, but it let you design and print birthday cards and stuff like that.



I also had Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis.

[TheFrugalGamer]

My first was probably Kid Pix, which I have very fond memories of, but I don't remember working it with for very long. As a got older, I started using Adobe Pagemaker, which was a print layout program that I used to make a neighborhood newspaper that I charged everyone a quarter for.

Then I moved on to MSPaint, where I made pixel dollz and struggled with the lack of layer support. Back then I wanted Paint Shop Pro more than anything, and I felt like I was really limited with the tools I had. These days I feel like layers are a bit overrated and do most of my pixel art without them. The grass is always greener...

It's funny I saw this topic today, though, because just last night I found a zine on Itch.io that all of you would probably like. It's an artbook made entirely of art done in old kids' software, and I love it! Check it out here:
https://everydaylouie.itch.i:ha:kidpix

[Gnorkel]

The very first art program i used was actually more of an in-app social media - Drawquest. Created by Chris Pool, the whole idea was that, every day, a new drawing prompt (usually a pre-drawn template) would be posted for you to do. This obviously incentivized people to keep coming back but it also was a great exercise in creativity. It was also the first time I had ever found an online community to join.



I remember it being one of the more popular art apps at the time, so the servers going down in 2014 was a shock to a lot of people... while reading up on this app again though i found out it became open source back in 2015.
I don't have any of my own drawings from there anymore. Which is probably good cause they were toddler drawings LOL. But I do have a single item saved, and it's this:



My MLP oc, drawn by a very sweet person lost to time. ^^

P.S. That KidPix zine @TheFrugalGamer linked is crazy cool!!!

[Guest]

MS Paint on Windows XP, lol (or maybe it was 95 or 98, don't quite remember).

[tokoissick]

definitely ms paint, when my family got a home pc! me and my brother thought it was super cool back then i still use it

[Skykristal]

If we ignore the few times I've scribbled letters and smiley faces in ms paint back in school, my first "actual" program was Colors!3D. A software that was available for the Nintendo3DS(XL) and which was also the console I drew on.
I absolutely loved drawing on that thing, and the best part was that you could bring your work much more to life with the 3D effect. There was this copy-paste and erase layer trick that I always used, to give pieces depth. It was a really fun thing to mess around with. I drew on it almost daily. (so.. not much has changed hahhaa)

Haven't picked it up in years however. I prefer to use my tablet these days. The Nintendo doesn't offer a very amazing image resolution either. BUT colors will always be an awesome program to me.


 

[wodaro]

My simple and technically correct answer is FireAlpaca, the program I downloaded after receiving a drawing tablet for my 15th birthday. However!!! This thread made me remember a website I used to use in elementary school called Sketchfu!

The website doesn't exist anymore, but you can find it on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20110226200349/http://sketchfu.com/

It was a website where people would draw in-browser, and the site would save the video of you drawing, so you could watch the process of the drawing being made! Or you could put messages in the drawing process, or if you're really creative you could use it as a form of animation!

I would draw anime art and silly pictures, and also ran a decently popular "club" where I would hold anime screencap redraw contests! Each drawing can be reacted to with "cute" "funny" or "impressive" and your cumulative reactions that you've received would be displayed on your profile, so you would "win" a certain amount of reactions on your pieces if I liked your anime drawing 

It was one of the first spaces where I started talking with people online, and where I talked with strangers about media I liked that no one I knew irl really cared about. I'm kinda sad it doesn't exist anymore, but it's a very fun memory! I wish I could still access my old profile... so many copy-pasted quotes/phrases/ascii art I would love to see again.

[CyberCat2000]

For me, the first art program I played with was Kid Pix for classic Mac OS! I remember in 1st grade, our computer time was on a trio of old PowerPC Macs, and one of them had Kid Pix. Even if I was a terrible artist at the time, I still had fun playing with it! (I also got to play with 3 Deluxe and Studio later on in my life. The undo guy in 3 Deluxe is pretty funny!)

I also occasionally dabbled into Paint when I was younger. I think I did an assignment in middle school on it!

As for the first "serious" drawing program of my current hobby? Krita for Android! I decided to play with it on my touchscreen Chromebook, and the first result wasn't half bad! This encouraged me to draw more as a hobby...

[minttea]

It has to be Paint Tool Sai! Despite digital being most of what I do now, back then I was really intimidated by it so it took a while for me to pick a program up.

[qrunchy]

The first program I legitimately used for art was something called Corel Painter Classic, which came bundled with my first Wacom tablet. I also used Photoshop Elements which was a part of the same bundle. I loved Painter Classic because it had more "realistic" brushes than Photoshop, with rendered grass and rocks and sparkles and things. I used the hell out of those sparkles lol

[tarraxahum]

I mean, if we're not counting the literal MS Paint...

Then I think that would be straight up Photoshop. Dad got some guys at work to hack him a copy, and there I went with the traditional approach of 'f*ck around and find out' ~~~

And the first program I've used once I got a tablet was ArtRage, since it came packaged with the tablet's drivers. Not for long, tho. Wasn't for me.