If you’ve never heard of ArtRage, it’s really is a spectacular (and reasonably priced) art application. It provides beautiful digital simulation of oils, watercolors, markers, pencils and other natural media. And despite its tremendous depth (with features like layering, stencils, stickers and blending modes), the interface is easy enough for beginners to dive in right away and start creating art. To give you an example of what’s possible, here’s an image (far beyond my feeble talents) created by ArtRage community member BoxFree.

The Pro version includes support for wet blending of paints, and Photoshop filters among other things. Both versions of the app work great with Wacom or Adesso drawing tablets, but I’ve also really enjoyed using it with my HP Touchsmart, where I figured out you could paint with real brushes! If you really want to see how well it works, there’s a great gallery of creations made with ArtRage here. You can also grab a 30-day demo copy to play with. But you really want the full version, right?

So back to the contest….

We’ve got 10 copies of the full ArtRage 3 Studio ($40 value each) to give away – either PC or Mac version, and all you need to do for a chance to win is post a comment below, telling us what feature of ArtRage 3 you’re most excited about. To get you started, check out the features list here. To be considered for the drawing, you must provide a valid comment and e-mail address (Limit 1 submission per e-mail or IP address, junk/spam entries will be disqualified). We will pick 10 random winners from all valid entries. It’s that easy! The contest will end at 11:59pm Central time on 5/26/2010, so get your entries in now!

[ArtRage]

See, the TouchSmart doesn’t actually detect pressure, but uses NextWindow’s infrared optical sensor technology to determine the position of your fingers. With a little experimentation, I discovered that pretty much anything that doesn’t scratch the screen can be used as a stylus.

While there’s no decent paint application that ships with the TouchSmart, you should definitely plunk down $25 bucks for a copy of Ambient Design’s ArtRage, a truly amazing low-cost natural media art application. The combination of ArtRage and a cheap $2 acrylic paintbrush is all you need to paint on screen. Check out my [cheesy] home video clip to see what all the fuss is about:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[View Video Clip in HD]

While I’ve played with graphic tablets and touchscreen finger-painting before, there’s nothing quite like using a real brush. At this point, there’s no way to detect the pressure or angle of the bristles, but at least one person has already put together a proof-of-concept for detecting brush width on the TouchSmart. Hopefully, it’s only a matter of time before that logic finds its way into a paint application.

So if you have a TouchSmart and even a single artistic bone in your body, you owe it to yourself to grab a copy of ArtRage, a couple of cheap paintbrushes, and get to painting. Maybe you’ll be the next Renoir or Picasso. Just be sure not to put any actual paint on your brush.