Painting programs that support natural media - which can simulate painting with watercolours and oils or drawing with charcoal and crayons - are not thick on the ground. Those that cost around £20 are translucently thin.

The first thing you notice about ArtRage is its interface. Rather than menu bars and toolboxes along the edges of the screen, the main tool and colour palettes are confined to the bottom corners. They and the subsidiary menus pop out of the way when you get close to them with a tool, to make more room on your canvas. The design is reminiscent of some of Kai Krause's innovative Mac application interfaces of the 90s; programs like Bryce and Photo Soap.

The most obvious natural media tools are all there: pencil, paint, chalk, roller, airbrush, felt pen and eraser, but there are some more exotic ones, too. The paint tube produces squidgy ‘oil paint', which can be spread and smeared with the palette knife. The glitter gun lays piles of coloured vermicelli on the canvas and the colour sampler extracts colours from your current paint tool, though - disappointingly - not from any point on the canvas.

The program is very easy to use with a mouse, but it really comes into its own with a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet, with many types supported. Each tool has its own properties; things like the amount of thinners and loading of the paintbrush and the size and shape of glitter.

One of the most interesting tool types is the stencil, of which there is a number of pre-defined examples included, everything from alphabets and speech bubbles to snowflakes and flowers. There's a useful semi-transparent ruler, too, that can be stretched to any length. You can define your own stencils by collecting the contents of a layer.

ArtRage 2.5 Plus supports Photoshop-compatible layers. You can change the transparency, size and blend mode of each, import files to specific ones and merge two or more together. Reordering layers is a simple drag-and-drop affair within the layer manager.

There are some things missing from the feature set, even though they may ‘bend' the direct painting and drawing analogy. It would be good to be able to mask any part of a painting, for instance, to clear it, modify it in isolation or use it as a stencil. Help bubbles would be useful, too, to remind you what the symbols mean, particularly when starting to use the software.

ArtRage is an amazing tool to start learning about digital art. It's about as close as you're going to get to using paint and brush on a computer and has enough feature-depth to keep even skilled PC or Mac artists amused. The support forums are active and many artists put their new work up on the Ambient Design site, for exhibition or constructive criticism. If you don't need the CD or paper manual, ArtRage itself can be downloaded for just $25; an art bargain.