NEW! Superior speed and performance
Manage memory-intensive operations, such as working on large canvases, plus zooming, rotating and working with layers, all at top speed. Equally important, your brushes will blaze across the canvas allowing you to focus on painting.

NEW! Updated user interface
Launch the newly designed Welcome Screen to kick start your painting experience. Create new documents and templates, choose from workflow UI layouts, see what is new and exciting in the world of Essentials, access helpful tutorials, view an inspirational art gallery and check out our brush packs for specific workflows.

Dry Natural-Media
Sketch your vision using the perfect pencil for the job, choose from grainy, thick and thin and scratchboard tool variations. Then, render your masterpiece using an exciting variety of Chalks, Pastels, Crayons and Charcoal including blunt, soft, square, tapered and jitter variants that will suit any task at hand.

Wet Natural-Media
Create an oil or acrylic painting using clumpy, glazing, flat or filbert brushes, spray fine, coarse or soft airbrush paint all over your canvas, dip in to digital watercolor to wash, spatter or diffuse paint and emulate Impressionist Masters like Sargent and Post-Impressionists like Van Gogh. No matter what, you will have fun experimenting!

Signature Painter media types
Create with unique Painter media types like dynamic Particles that spring, flow and gravitate across canvas, plus F-X effects that sprinkle fairy dust, glow, jitter, shatter, distort and more! Or grab a Pattern Pen to stroke decorative brushstrokes across your canvas like magic.

Smart photo-painting tools
Start off easy using the one-touch Auto-Paint tool. Simply open the photo of your choice, select a painting style and click play. As a must-have paint editor, Essentials will magically paint the photo for you using Smart Stroke technology that follows the lines and contours in your image, no hands required.

Tracing and cloning images
Sketch right over your photo using Tracing Paper as a guide to ensure that your hand drawn composition is perfection or create a one-of-a-kind photo painting by pulling the colors from your photo through any brush allowing you to fill the canvas with hand-hewn strokes.

Symmetry painting
The time-saving Mirror tool reflects your painting on the opposite side of the canvas using your media of choice. Turn on Kaleidoscope and paint using 3-12 reflective segments and create stunning kaleidoscope paintings.

Drawing tablet support
Essentials incorporates pressure sensitive memory that will adapt to your particular touch. Provide a sample of your stroke in the Brush Tracker to globally set sensitivity or save your pressure for each of your favorite brushes allowing Essentials to remember and respond accordingly.