A painting app that works offline with no subscription
Easel by Zaweba is a free natural-media painting studio for Windows that works fully offline, with no account and no subscription to keep up.
That description fits Easel by Zaweba exactly. It is a natural-media painting studio for Windows that works entirely offline and has no subscription. It is free software under the EULA, and it needs no account, so once it is installed you can open it and paint with no internet connection and nothing to sign into.
Plenty of creative software now expects you to stay signed in, keep paying, or store your work online. That suits some people. Others would rather have a program that sits on their own PC and keeps working the same way next year, on a train, in a cabin or wherever there's no signal.
What you get without paying or signing in
Easel is a full painting studio, not a cut-down sampler. Every picture starts on a real surface, chosen from 37, including canvases, watercolour papers, coloured pastel paper, wood, brick, concrete, blackboard, glass and wet plaster for fresco. Watercolours flow, bloom and granulate, gouache re-wets, acrylic dries fast and oil stays wet for impasto. Pencils run from 6H to 8B, and there are coloured pencils, charcoal, pastels, chalk, crayon, biro, fountain pen and more.
You squeeze paint onto a palette, mix it with a knife and load your brush. Colours mix like pigment, so blue and yellow make green. Tilt the canvas and wet paint runs downhill. Masking tape, masking fluid and stencils give hard edges, and there are guides, a tracing sheet and view checks such as mirror, values and squint.
Your files stay on your PC
Paintings save as .zeasel files on your own drive. A .zeasel keeps wet paint wet, as well as the palette, masks and time-lapse, so you can close a painting tonight and carry on tomorrow exactly where you left off. Exports are PNG, JPEG and TIFF at 1x or 2x, and the time-lapse exports as WebM video or a web page. Nothing has to be uploaded anywhere.
What your PC needs
Because Easel paints on the graphics card in WebGL2, a decent graphics card helps. A mid-range card paints smoothly even on an A3 sheet at 300 DPI. A basic built-in chip works too: if frames come late, wet paint moves a little slower rather than your strokes lagging. Large canvases need plenty of memory, with an A3 sheet at 300 DPI using about 1 GB. Easel runs on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) and uses the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime, which comes with Windows 11.
Painters it was made for
Easel is made for painters who want watercolour without the ruined paper, sketchers who love the feel of graphite and charcoal, art students practising techniques before buying materials, and street artists planning a wall in spray paint. It also suits anyone who simply wants a painting program they own outright and can rely on without a connection.
How it fits with other Zaweba software
Easel works well alongside other free Zaweba programs. Edit in Paint by Zaweba sends a PNG of your painting to Paint by Zaweba, an image editor with layers, masks and live layer effects that also works offline. The time-lapse can become a Windows screensaver through Screensavers by Zaweba.
Getting started
Download Easel from its page on zaweba.com, install it and pick a surface. A good first session is a single watercolour sky on cold-pressed paper, which shows off how the paint flows and dries.
If you have been looking for a painting app that does not need a subscription or a connection, Easel by Zaweba is a straightforward answer: free, offline and yours to use.
