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 3.4.16 (see changelog for more info):

Improved cut and paste (now you can also rotate the pasted image).