FireAlpaca for Windows

A free painting and drawing tool

FireAlpaca is a surprisingly powerful free painting and drawing tool for Windows and Mac computers. Its biggest strength lies in its simplicity. Anyone can sit down and start drawing illustrations with little effort. And, unlike its resource-heavy competitor Adobe Photoshop, you won’t have any trouble running this lightweight program on your computer. 

FireAlpaca comes with many useful tools that any digital artist would find helpful, such as selection tools, move tools, pencils, brushes, eyedropper, hand tools, bucket, gradient tools, and tools for manipulating shapes and symmetry. It’s an excellent alternative to other painting programs like Krita and Sai. It’s also suitable for both amateur and advanced users. 

FireAlpaca’s main features 

FireAlpaca has a simple interface with easy-to-use controls and lots of space between elements so it doesn’t feel cramped. At the very top of the screen are the program’s broader functions like file settings, and layers. On the right-hand side you have access to the main illustration tools like the brush, eraser, dot tool, move, fill, bucket, select, lasso, magic wand, select pen/eraser, text, operation, divide, eyedropper, and hand tool. 

Clicking on a tool opens a secondary set of options where you can explore various aspects of the tool. Clicking on the brush tool for example lets you change the color, size, and type of brush. 

There are lots of different brushes to choose from, and FireAlpaca adds new ones each week. There are standard brushes that mimic regular brush strokes, and lots of unique ones like Thorn which creates a trail of 3D thorns, or Leaf which leaves behind a trail of leaves. 

You can even create your own original brush and add various effects, unique patterns, or images. Take it one step further and add symmetry or rotational symmetry to create an altogether unexpected pattern. 

Even more helpful tools 

Trying to draw or color freehand can be tough. With the snap tools, you can draw along guidelines like straight lines, circles, radial lines, and even turn on 3D perspective. FileAlpaca also comes with lots of image editing tools like layer support, rotate, filters, resizing, canvas sizing, and flip. With these tools, you can generate images and easily manipulate them as needed.  

Interestingly, FireAlpaca has the ability to transform your images into animations using the Onion Skin mode. This feature works by merging all of your layers and then turns them into frames. For the animation to work your layers must be visually compatible. If you make any mistakes, FireAlpaca has a large memory of backups so you can hit the undo button as many times as you like. 

To help you learn the ins and outs of FireAlpaca, they offer plenty of comprehensive guides and tutorials to help you learn your way around the program and improve your technique. The AlpacaSchool covers all of the tools found in the program, along with advanced techniques, like creating a GIF animation, or applying clipping to multiple layers. 

What file types does FireAlpaca support?

FireAlpaca supports the most useful file types, such as JPEG, PNG, Bitmap, and PSD. Not every free graphic design program supports all these file types, so it’s excellent to see FireAlpaca support them. 

Setting up FireAlpaca 

FireAlpaca is a free downloadable program. To start using it, first, click the download button, then open the .exe file to start the installer wizard. The program is available in multiple languages, including English and Japanese and you can choose to install FireAlpaca in any of the available languages. The next step is to choose the folder to install FireAlpaca. You’ll need at least 91.3 MB of free space on your device to install it. When the installation is complete you can open the program and start using it. 

Our take 

FireAlpaca may be free, but it packs a powerful punch. On the surface, it may seem to only have basic illustration functions. But after digging a little deeper and taking advantage of their free tutorials, you will uncover a powerful graphic design program that’s fit for most digital artists. 

Should you download it 

If you’re an amateur or pro digital artist looking for a free graphic design tool, then definitely check out FireAlpaca. It has many of the basic tools required along with advanced features. With FireAlpaca you can create simple and advanced drawings, comics, animated GIFs, anime, and more.