Here, the entire range of brushes from artistic watercolours and airbrushes through to photo-realistic objects and abstract effects has been overhauled and recategorised to make them easier to find.

This is most apparent in DrawPlus’s excellent vector and bitmap-based brushes which can be used to create striking stroke, spray and edge effects. The emphasis on the technical side of illustration might make DrawPlus X4 sound a bit dull, but the program also has strong creative capabilities. There’s also a new Colour Palette Designer which automatically generates colour palettes based on your choice of base colour and colour harmony rules (monochrome, triad, complementary and so on). The new Colour Picker tool lets you sample average colours rather than points and, if you drag rather than click, you can quickly pick up and apply gradients. In terms of formatting power, DrawPlus offers good handling of tiling bitmaps, gradients and mesh fills, but the most important option remains simple flat colours.

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