I've been working with DrawPlus for a couple years. I found DrawPlus because I was looking for a light weight program that I could use for drawing on my tablet PC. DrawPlus was perfect. Light weight and fast. Customizable interface, touch support, and very cool brush tools. The whole thing just allowed me to make the most of the limited space on a tablet PC.
The problem though was that DrawPlus wasn't perfect. It was always a struggle with bugs and features that didn't work properly. The layer system is difficult to work with and very buggy. Other features were too buggy to bother with but I stuck with DrawPlus just for drawing even though the features needed foe coloring my drawing right in DrawPlus were missing.
I made a lot of effort to export my drawings, a very, very slow process, to Photoshop where I could color them more easily. There I had to correct for quality problems in the image exports, then combine all the layers into a single document in Photoshop, then begin to color/paint. There were quality issues at every step. The brushes and settings were both wonderful and buggy at the same time. The brushes routinely produced these rough edges that I had constantly fix.
I had hope that X6 would solve much of these problems because it just made sense to do so. DrawPlus had all these great ideas that all just needed refinement. X6 came around and...nothing. Really nothing. All the bugs from X5 are still there. All the rough edges are still there. It's hard to understand why Serif decided to add such pointless new features to X6 and not fix the bugs. I think a lot of us would have been happy if they'd just fixed the bugs and added no new features. Just make the program more usable.
I bought a new Wacom drawing surface. With this drawing surface, programs like Illustrator came back into play. Illustrator didn't support touch, didn't have a highly customizable interface and for those reasons I couldn't use it on my tablet PC easily. But of course, Illustrator has the very best brush tools in existence in a vector program. It also has all those wonderful features that we spent a lot of time wishing for on Serif forums. So I've gone back to Illustrator for drawing. I was doing all my other vector work in Illustrator anyway so it feels comfortable.
I can't say for certain that I won't find some use for DrawPlus in the future. It's still a very unique program, at least as far as the brush tools are concerned, but it's simply plagued with quality issues and Serif doesn't appear to be moving to solve those problems.
It's really disappointing. I made a massive effort to use DrawPlus. I spent money. I bought and upgraded from X4 to X6 even when X6 had nothing that could reasonably be considered useful new features and even the bugs aren't fixed in X6. I converted hundreds of brushes from Illustrator for use in DrawPlus and designed many other brushes in DrawPlus and even that process was buggy. I did good work in DrawPlus but it took a lot of patience and effort. I fought the good fight but DrawPlus just needs a lot more work and Serif doesn't seem prepared to do that work. If at some point in the future I find that Serif has decided to get serious about DrawPlus and fix the million bugs and smooth out all the rough edges I'm sure I'd be happy to begin using it again but for now, it's going on the back burner while I refocus on Illustrator.
The problem though was that DrawPlus wasn't perfect. It was always a struggle with bugs and features that didn't work properly. The layer system is difficult to work with and very buggy. Other features were too buggy to bother with but I stuck with DrawPlus just for drawing even though the features needed foe coloring my drawing right in DrawPlus were missing.
I made a lot of effort to export my drawings, a very, very slow process, to Photoshop where I could color them more easily. There I had to correct for quality problems in the image exports, then combine all the layers into a single document in Photoshop, then begin to color/paint. There were quality issues at every step. The brushes and settings were both wonderful and buggy at the same time. The brushes routinely produced these rough edges that I had constantly fix.
I had hope that X6 would solve much of these problems because it just made sense to do so. DrawPlus had all these great ideas that all just needed refinement. X6 came around and...nothing. Really nothing. All the bugs from X5 are still there. All the rough edges are still there. It's hard to understand why Serif decided to add such pointless new features to X6 and not fix the bugs. I think a lot of us would have been happy if they'd just fixed the bugs and added no new features. Just make the program more usable.
I bought a new Wacom drawing surface. With this drawing surface, programs like Illustrator came back into play. Illustrator didn't support touch, didn't have a highly customizable interface and for those reasons I couldn't use it on my tablet PC easily. But of course, Illustrator has the very best brush tools in existence in a vector program. It also has all those wonderful features that we spent a lot of time wishing for on Serif forums. So I've gone back to Illustrator for drawing. I was doing all my other vector work in Illustrator anyway so it feels comfortable.
I can't say for certain that I won't find some use for DrawPlus in the future. It's still a very unique program, at least as far as the brush tools are concerned, but it's simply plagued with quality issues and Serif doesn't appear to be moving to solve those problems.
It's really disappointing. I made a massive effort to use DrawPlus. I spent money. I bought and upgraded from X4 to X6 even when X6 had nothing that could reasonably be considered useful new features and even the bugs aren't fixed in X6. I converted hundreds of brushes from Illustrator for use in DrawPlus and designed many other brushes in DrawPlus and even that process was buggy. I did good work in DrawPlus but it took a lot of patience and effort. I fought the good fight but DrawPlus just needs a lot more work and Serif doesn't seem prepared to do that work. If at some point in the future I find that Serif has decided to get serious about DrawPlus and fix the million bugs and smooth out all the rough edges I'm sure I'd be happy to begin using it again but for now, it's going on the back burner while I refocus on Illustrator.