SpeedyPainter is a lightweight and easy-to-use painting tool.

The program is portable, and tiny, so it's no surprise that the interface is very basic. There are no menus, no toolbars. Just a few buttons and sliders scattered around the drawing area.

Get started, though, and you'll find SpeedyPainter offers more features than you might expect. Wacom tablet support means you can vary stroke size and opacity with your pen pressure. A versatile colour picker can pop up at your cursor position for quick and easy access. There are rotate, flip and crop tools, even a perspective grid overlay to help you produce more realistic images.

Most of these tools have plenty of functionality, too. So once you've drawn a crop area, you can apply it, rotate it, or pan the image underneath it to select the right area. But this is rarely, if ever confusing, because the program always displays simple prompts top-left of the screen to explain your various options. And a Help screen with reminders of the various hotkeys is only ever a click away.

Once your masterpiece is complete, SpeedyPainter won't just save the image. It also captures each stroke as you work, and can export the results as an AVI file (480p, 720p, 1080p), a great way to see how the picture was produced. Don't take our word for it: browse the SpeedyPainter gallery and see for yourself.

Version 3.6.3 (see changelog for more info):

- Bucket fill tool: added a checkbox that allows to sample all visible layers in order to detect the fill area. When this new option is on you can, for example, have the lineart on one layer and use the bucket fill tool into another layer, and the fill area will still be restricted inside the lineart boundaries.
- Layers list widget: added a button to merge current layer with the underlying one (in previous versions this functionality was accessible only via the [CTRL+E] keyboard shortcut).
- Improved compatibility with older graphics cards.