Project Dogwaffle

A few years ago, I didn't have much in the way of money, and that spurred me to search for freeware for whatever I needed. My search led me to Project Dogwaffle, a somewhat odd-looking paint program with lots of options and brushes. This was back when I had no tablet and used a mouse for all my drawings. It had simulations of airbrush, pens, pencils, charcoal, pastel, and even water and oil-based paints. It even had stamp brushes that I used to paint grass, leaves, and flowers onto collage-like pictures of trees.

This review is for the free version.

The controls are a bit tricky in Dogwaffle if you are not used to them. To invoke the brush and graphics menus, you must right-click with your mouse or click the button on your tablet stylus. These menus are shown as pictures in the Tools window, along with the texture, which you can change the settings of with a right-click. The texture bumpiness and scale can be changed, as can the drybrush and visibility settings, which determine whether or not the paper texture of the work area, or buffer, will be seen.

Project Dogwaffle's background is also different, bluish gray with a burnished metal texture. When a new buffer is created, there is a selection screen for canvas sizes, though a custom size can also be specified if it is typed in the width and height spaces, and it can be switched from portrait(taller than wide) to landscape(wider than tall) by clicking on the box in the lower right corner, with the circular arrow on it. There is even a way to add your own custom sizes to that menu by editing the file in the 'project dogwaffle' folder called Def_Res.txt.

The basic tools are there - the pixel brush and airbrush, but there is no eraser(you have to just use white). It even has gradient, shape, and flood fill tools, but I guarantee the natural brush tools are far more fun.

The pen tools were made to function much like the real pen, and the ink pen makes thinner lines when the mouse or tablet stylus is moved faster. It is possible to make a realistic ballpoint pen or ink pen sketch without the mess of ink, wasted paper, spills, or non-erasable lines. Most of the pencil/charcoal tools utilize the multiply mode which allows darkening only, mimicking most traditional media in which lighter colors often layer on top of each other and become darker. This darkening effect is not perfect, and is often too pronounced to look completely realistic, but it is useful for certain drawing styles. The pencil and pen are both good tools for preliminary sketches and for inking for comics or cartoons.

The paints come in three different types: oils, tempera, and watercolor. The oils come in fine liner, loaded, splotches, drybrush, and a few impastos or thick oils. The totally oils brush is great for making strokes which seem to pop out, and can be used for tree leaves and trunks, clouds, and other soft textures. Splotchy can be used for patches of grass and folliage, while the liner can be used for thinner tree trunks and branches, grass blades, fur, and hair.

Tempera is waterbased, as is watercolor, and both look similar except the watercolor is more translucent. They have both graphic-based and custom brushes, including the rakes and sponges which can be used for large areas, and the loaded and liner brushes for detail. Since they use the paper bump-texture, these brushes can be used to make some fairly realistic watercolor effects, and the water blending is great for blending in skies, highlights and shadows.

Pastels follow the texture of the paper and look very much like real pastels, dusty and soft. They can be used for realistic-looking pastel paintings and are great for artists who cannot afford real artist-grade pastels. For blending, I would recommend the water blending tool rather than the smudge, though the smudge is also better than the smear tool.

For effects, Project Dogwaffle has dodge, burn, smear, smudge, and soft glow. The dodge and soft glow are additive and screen, while the burn tool is subtractive. You can control these effects by selecting them first, and then selecting a color from the palette. For example: select the dodge tool, then select green, and draw over a red area, to make it yellow. It works on the principle of additive light - Red Green Blue. With burn, if you select red and draw over a white area, it turns it cyan, since it takes away the red and leaves only the green and blue.

The organic effects are graphics based and most are simply image-stamps, while smoky and starry are dodge/screen and burn brushes. My favorites were the grass, leaf and floral brushes, and I would often play with them, giving the brushes different graphics from the menu.

Many paint programs such as Photoshop and Painter will cost around $300-500, but often what a beginning or even an advanced painter really needs is a piece of paper, some paints, and other simple tools along with his or her know-how and imagination. Project Dogwaffle may be just the program since even the free version has so much to offer. If you want to try some great realistic tools with added effects like glitter and friskets, try Artrage on for size - it has freeware and commercial mode. But if you are looking for something that has no nag-dialogs and no pressure for buying the full version, then get Dogwaffle.