Jennifer Bolton is married with two boys, both special needs. She is the owner of the Special Needs in Homeschooling. Jennifer uses free resources for teaching whenever she can, to keep her boys’ interests and to tailor their learning experiences to their individual learning styles and special needs.

My family is not artistic. At least I didn’t believe we were until the computer age started. We all have sensory issues that deter us from our getting hands dirty, making a mess, working with different art mediums, or anything that means actually touching something that is “gooey”. Once I started using Photo software to enhance pictures, I fell in love. I showed my son how to use it, he showed his little brother and before I knew it, we found something creative that we all enjoyed!

Our sensory issues and finances do pose a few problems in our creativity in this form though. First, many photo programs are expensive!  Some photo programs stop short in the mediums it uses. Sure, I can highlight a picture and click here then click there and suddenly have a chalk drawn picture.  But I just clicked buttons, I didn’t actually draw the picture. I didn’t get to experience how the chalk smudges for different affects or blends with different colors and mediums to create something new.

So the hunt for something that would allow us to use different mediums lead us to ArtRage 2.5.

“With ArtRage you can paint with oils, sketch with pencils, sprinkle sparkling glitter and much more. Stencils and rulers let you create precise shapes or smooth curves and straight lines freehand. Tracing and Reference images let you load photos to recreate as paintings either by eye or by letting ArtRage select colors for you as you paint. For professional users, ArtRage offers Layers, Layer Groups and Layer Blend Modes compatible with the PSD file format.  Best of all, ArtRage doesn’t force you to learn complex tool settings, it lets you get right down to painting with tools you already know how to use.”

This program allows us to use glitter, paint tubes, photos or clear canvas, paint in layers, produce soft edge air brush strokes, use stencils and rulers, leave paint splats, paint with metallics, store custom colors and so much more! In the free version, it’s pretty basic and gives the basic mediums of a paint brush (complete with strokes), chalk, pencil, and a few more. You get a bit of every section and it works like a demo but with no limit on when the demo ends. It is good for beginners and for primary grades. The price to upgrade is very reasonable at a one time cost of $25. It’s offered in English, French and Dutch. It can be downloaded to Windows and Mac.

We can draw that chalk picture that allows us to find out what that medium can do, all virtually! No mess, no fuss. This tool allows you to save your work in .jpeg format so you can do some of your art in this program and easily open it in another program for more advanced image work. Everything can be saved on the computer and your work is printable - great for posting on the fridge!

If you decide to download ArtRage, let us know how it works for you!