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DeviantArt Muro Screenshoit

Sorry for the rather sorry-looking drawing. Check out some way better examples here!

Ever wanted to draw whatever you want when you’re bored? You’re in luck, and you don’t have to use Paint on Windows. DeviantArt released a cool looking app quite a while ago, Muro. It’s basically a drawing board for free, as long you have Internet access. :-)

For a website, the tool is quite sophisticated, you can select a any color you need with the color selector located on the bottom. You can draw with 19 tools, although 12 are “Premium” tools and must be bought with a DeviantArt account. The free drawing tools are just fine to make good abstract works. You can also use the familiar paint bucket and the Eye Dropper.

Just like Adobe Photoshop, you can apply a variety of filters to the drawing like motion blur, smooth, emboss and adjusting contrast. Made a mistake? You can easily erase it or click the Undo button. Just use your mouse and draw away! Once you’re gone, you can save the image as .png to your computer to share on the net or keep to yourself.

In the Pro mode, you can also add/remove layers and change each layer’s opacity. This will allow you to create sophisticated works using layers, an invaluable feature in modern graphic editing programs. Layer transparency is preserved when you save/export it.

All this is thanks to the new innovations in HTML5 like the canvas tag. Most of the features wouldn’t be possible at all using Adobe Flash. As HTML5 adoption is rather shaky right now, you will need a recent and standard-compliant browser such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera or at the very least, IE9. If you have a Wacom tablet lying around, you can use it to draw with the stylus! (Plug-in required)

Check it out here!

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