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My wife and I have been getting into making small stickers and artsy stuff as a pass time for awhile. Shes been thinking of taking it up a notch and sell them on Etsy or something. Anywho, shes wanting some kind of art program where she could scan her doodles into said program and then color them using the program. She draws them in black and white and wants to color them but all she has is paint and it looks terrible lol. Any ideas? Neither of us are super skilled so something thats easy or intuitive. Her dad gave her a photoshop program and that thing is pretty damn complex lol.

Ideas? Thanks in advance

I use Photoshop but it's pretty spendy. There are some alternatives, though:

Paint Net is a little more full featured than ms paint, but a little limited, and the price is right since it's free.

A little more powerful is Paint Shop Pro, which has free trials but will cost you about 50 bucks. Note that the PC download version costs twice as much a disc because lol, feth you, that's why.

Gimp is totally free and is quite powerful, but it's got a somewhat poor UI which makes it a little harder to pick up. It's pretty close to Photoshop in capabilities.

As a side note, instead of scanning in her doodles, you might want to look into maybe getting a Wacom or similar tablet. You're halfway there, and they're pretty cheap - $70ish new and I bet you can get them cheap on ebay.

One thing you can try for free is Gimp (free, slightly less user-friendly version of photoshop.)

I used it to design the cover of my book and overall it came out quite nice. The program can do just about anything... the trick is finding the right tutorial online.

 Ouze wrote:
I use Photoshop but it's pretty spendy. There are some alternatives, though:

Paint Net is a little more full featured than ms paint, but a little limited, and the price is right since it's free.

A little more powerful is Paint Shop Pro, which has free trials but will cost you about 50 bucks. Note that the PC download version costs twice as much a disc because lol, feth you, that's why.

Gimp is totally free and is quite powerful, but it's got a somewhat poor UI which makes it a little harder to pick up. It's pretty close to Photoshop in capabilities.

As a side note, instead of scanning in her doodles, you might want to look into maybe getting a Wacom or similar tablet. You're halfway there, and they're pretty cheap - $70ish new and I bet you can get them cheap on ebay.

Talk about a perfect post! Thanks for all the leg work. My wife tried out paint net and although limited it did work decently enough. Ill check out Gimp as Im not opposed to working on figuring things out its just Id rather it be easier than complicated. As for the tablet idea Ill look into that as well, she has a decent tablet so maybe we'll look into that avenue anyways.

Thanks for the info gents I appreciate it

I love Pixlr.

https://pixlr.com/editor/

It does everything I need and is free.