With countless digital painting software available online, it can be hard to decide which programs are worth the investment. When competition is so costly, it is always worthwhile checking out other digital painting options.
FireAlpaca is a promising art and painting software for digital creators, and it could be your new favorite digital art tool.
What Is FireAlpaca?
Screenshot by Ruby Helyer, author. No attribution required.
FireAlpacais a digital art and painting software with similarities to Adobe Photoshop, Photopea, Adobe Illustrator, and CorelDRAW. It was first released in 2011 and has been improving its digital painting software since.
The FireAlpaca team continuously releases new brushes and tutorials for using its software. The art brushes are great and even in competition with manyProcreate brushes you can download, not least since they are released natively rather than third-party.
This Japanese digital painting software is great for newbies and experts alike. It provides many tools and features to push your digital art to new dimensions. It’s also great for those who are exploring digital art and don’t want to invest too much in software just yet.
How to Run FireAlpaca
FireAlpaca is available for both Windows and Mac systems. you may only download FireAlpaca for desktop as it’s not available for any Apple or Android tablets. If you need a tablet-based digital art app, considerAdobe Fresco or Procreatefor the iPad.
The FireAlpaca app is around 90MB, so it doesn’t take up much space. It’s easy to download and install by going to the FireAlpaca website and navigating to thedownload page. From there, you can choose to download for MacOS 10.7 or later or for Windows Vista or later. You can also download older versions of the app if you run an older operating system.
Aside from standard FireAlpaca, there’s also FireAlpaca SE. This is the same program but with more exclusive access to features and quality. you’re able to get the SE version from Steam from the link on the download page.
Once downloaded, open the installer, follow the instructions, and run FireAlpaca once done.
Is FireAlpaca Free?
The standard Windows and Mac versions of FireAlpaca are completely free. FireAlpaca’s own motto states, “It’s free, but great!”, to give you confidence in the program’s price point.
Both the Windows and Mac apps have internal ad popups—these are few and far between and do not distract from your creativity. The ads are largely advertising FireAlpaca’s own product and are easily dismissible.
FireAlpaca SE is a premium version of FireAlpaca. For a one-time cost of $40, you’re able to have ad-free, better-quality digital painting access. There are alsobundle optionsto buy FireAlpaca SE with another software, openCanvas. Digital artists often prefer the one-cost model over Adobe’s fixed monthly subscription model.
What Can You Do With FireAlpaca?
With FireAlpaca’s free and premium software, you can do many things that you’d find in alternative digital art software. You can access layers and transparency, along with different color profiles like generic CMYK profiles and a multitude of RGB profiles for sharing your art digitally.
The workspace and general interface of FireAlpaca are like most digital art software. Its main toolbar runs vertically on the left edge, with more detailed tool options next to the toolbar and on the right-hand side. Your artboard sits in the middle of the page.
FireAlpaca SE may offer changing interfaces as the program is developed. These updates are included in your one-time cost and don’t ever detract from the ability to draw or paint digitally in the app.
You can create animations and time lapses in FireAlpaca. This takes it a step up from many free painting software and allows you not only to turn your drawings into animations but also to record your techniques as you go.
When creating a new document, you can choose between standard artboards, comic artboards, or animation artboards. Once set up, you’re good to add your drawing or painting as you wish.
One unique feature found in FireAlpaca are the snap tools. While other programs offer a standard snap-to-grid feature, FireAlpaca’s snap tools are more comprehensive in their offerings. you’re able to snap your line work or eraser to standardized grids, but also spiral and circular grids, perspective grids, and more. This feature is great for drawing comics or anything in a particular format or grid perspective.
You can also use the eyedropper tool to collect a transparent version of the color you’re sampling. This is a timesaving tool that aids you in quick transparency instead of constantly changing settings to reach optimum opacity levels and changing colors while doing so.
The Limitations of Using FireAlpaca
This interface might take some time to get used to. Most of the tools are in the typical places and use typical keyboard shortcuts, but FireAlpaca is not Photoshop. Give yourself some time to learn where and how FireAlpaca works in comparison to what you’re used to.
While learning the new interface and tools, you’ll see that the names of the tools do not appear when you hover your cursor over them. If you don’t know what the icon is, the only way to find out is to try using the tool.
The biggest limitation of FireAlpaca is it only creates raster-based artwork. While this is fine if you’re creating art that will stay the same size, won’t be printed, or scaled up or down, a digital platform offering no vector features is limiting to many artists.
We have a short guide onthe differences between raster and vector formatsto help you decide if it’s worth making the switch to raster-only software. If the switch is too risky, there are some greatfree alternatives to Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based program.
Could FireAlpaca Be the Next Best Digital Painting Software?
It’s easy to make comparisons to larger digital painting software, especially those that eclipse the digital art industry like Adobe or Affinity products. FireAlpaca offers many of the same tools and features, but it doesn’t seem to be as popular as its big-name counterparts.
For free software, FireAlpaca packs a punch, and even its premium version is inexpensive with much promise. FireAlpaca is definitely worth checking out.
