Arting On the Cheap

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

When you need to do math for vector art, it helps to be able to store variables and keep the history

Full-featured graphic design and illustration application created for macOS and iOS.

ImageMagick is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100) including GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PhotoCD, TIFF, and DPX. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves. ImageMagick is free software delivered as a ready-to-run binary distribution or as source code that you can freely use, copy, modify, and distribute. Its license is compatible with the GPL. It runs on all major operating systems. The functionality of ImageMagick is typically utilized from the command line or you can use the features from programs written in your favorite programming language. Choose from these interfaces: MagickCore (C), MagickWand (C), ChMagick (Ch), Magick++ (C++), JMagick (Java), L-Magick (Lisp), PascalMagick (Pascal), PerlMagick (Perl), MagickWand for PHP (PHP), PythonMagick (Python), RMagick (Ruby), or TclMagick (Tcl/TK). With a language interface, use ImageMagick to modify or create images automagically and dynamically.

Krita is a complete creative sketching and painting application with advanced, commercial quality features. It's free, open-source and available across all major desktop platforms.

User Interface - An intuitive user interface that stays out of your way. The dockers and panels can be moved and customized for your specific workflow. Once you have your setup, you can save it as your own workspace. You can also create your own shortcuts for commonly used tools.

Pop-up Palette - Quickly pick your color and brush by right-clicking on the canvas.

Brush Stabilizers - Have a shaky hand? Add a stabilizer to your brush to smoothen it out.

Brush Engines - Customize your brushes with 9 unique brush engines.

Wrap-around mode - It is easy to create seamless textures and patterns now. Press the ‘W’ key while painting to toggle wrap-around mode.

Resource Manager - Import brush and texture packs from other artists to expand your tool set.

Layer Management - Krita comes with vector, filter, group, and file layers. Combine, order, and flatten layers to keep organized. Add drop shadows and other simple effects using visual styles.

Full Color Management - Krita supports full color management through LCMS for ICC and OpenColor IO for EXR, allowing you to incorporate Krita into your existing color management pipeline.

Useful for editing SVGs as plain-text with a live preview

Archive of freely downloadable fonts. Browse by alphabetical listing, by style, by author or by popularity.

The fonts presented on this website are their authors' property, and are either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain. The licence mentioned above the download button is just an indication. Please look at the readme-files in the archives or check the indicated author's website for details, and contact him if in doubt.
If no author/licence is indicated that's because we don't have information, that doesn't mean it's free.

FontSpace is a top 5,000 website that reaches a distinct market of graphics designers, hobbyists, scrap-bookers, and typeface enthusiasts. FontSpace accepts fonts of all shapes and sizes and helps you find one for your next project

Font Book is the standard font manager that comes with Mac OS.

The program enables users to:
Preview and install font files, avoiding multiple instances of the same font.
Review installed fonts using various sample texts and sizes.
Group fonts into collections, which can then be used in all Cocoa programs.
Activate/deactivate individual fonts or collections.
Check the data integrity of font files.
Export font collections for use on another computer

GIMP is a free program for such photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. Essentially it's the closest thing to Photoshop you can get for free.