A free natural media painting program for Windows
Easel by Zaweba is free natural-media painting software for Windows, with 37 real surfaces, wet paints that flow and dry media that catch the grain.
Easel by Zaweba is free natural-media painting software for Windows 10 and 11. It is built as an artist's studio rather than a paint program: every picture starts on a real surface with its own tooth and absorbency, wet paints such as watercolour and oil flow, blend and dry, and dry media such as pencil and charcoal catch the grain. It runs offline and needs no account.
Natural media software tries to make digital tools behave like the physical ones. Easel goes about this by simulating the materials themselves, from how much water is in a brush to how far wet paint runs when the canvas is tilted.
The surfaces come first
You start by choosing what to paint on. The original twelve are stretched canvas, canvas board, cold-pressed and hot-pressed watercolour paper, cartridge paper, sketchbook paper, coloured pastel paper in six colours, card, wood panel, brick wall, concrete and blackboard. Version 1.1 took the list to 37, adding rough watercolour paper, linen and cotton duck, toned, sanded, kraft and tracing papers, clay board, scraperboard, slate, glass, rice paper, parchment, papyrus and wet plaster for fresco, among others.
Surfaces change how paint acts. Thin paper cockles when soaked unless you stretch it, slick surfaces wipe clean, fibrous rice paper bleeds along its fibres and a blade scratches scraperboard back to white.
Wet media
Watercolour flows, blooms, granulates on rough paper, lifts with a clean damp brush and dries with darker edges, in about 20 to 30 seconds of real time. Gouache is opaque and re-wets. Acrylic dries fast and builds thick. Oil stays wet for around 10 minutes, mixes on the canvas and builds impasto. Version 1.1 added egg tempera, casein, encaustic, alkyd, gloss enamel, poster paint, pouring acrylic, gesso, modelling paste and more.
Colour mixes the way pigment does, using the Kubelka-Munk model, so blue and yellow make green.
Dry media and pens
Graphite runs from 6H to 8B and darkens pass by pass until the grain is full, then burnishes. There is coloured pencil, charcoal, soft and oil pastel, chalk and wax crayon, which resists water-based paint laid over it. Pens include biro, fountain pen, calligraphy broad nib, felt tip, fineliner, dip pens, quills, reed and bamboo pens and brush pens. Pressure from a pen tablet sets how deep the tip reaches into the grain.
Studio habits built in
A physical palette lets you squeeze paint out, mix it with a knife and load the brush. Brushes carry a limited load, run dry and get dirty when dragged through wet paint, though by default each stroke dips a fresh load. Masking tape, masking fluid and stencils give clean edges. The canvas tilts, and wet paint runs downhill.
View checks such as mirror, values and squint help you judge the picture without changing it.
What you need to run it
Easel uses the graphics card through WebGL2. A mid-range card paints an A3 sheet at 300 DPI smoothly, and a basic built-in chip also works, with wet paint moving a little slower rather than your strokes lagging. Big canvases need memory: an A3 sheet at 300 DPI uses about 1 GB. It uses the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime, which comes with Windows 11. There is also a Mac and Linux version built on the same studio page.
Saving and sharing your work
Pictures are saved as .zeasel files, which keep wet paint wet along with the palette, masks and time-lapse. You can export PNG, JPEG or TIFF at 1x or 2x, send a PNG to Paint by Zaweba for further editing, or export the time-lapse of the session as a WebM video, a web page or a screensaver.
If you are new to it, try one of the 28 presets, such as pencil sketch, loose wash or impasto knife, and change one thing at a time. It is the fastest way to learn what each material does.
