The transformation of a picture into a painting happens before your very eyes — you can follow the birth of a work of art in real time! The program offers these painting styles: Oil, Watercolor, Gouache, Comics, Pen & Ink, Linocut, and Pastel.

The Oil technique converts your photographs into oil paintings. The program lays brush strokes naturally using the original photo as a reference. Even with the default settings you can achieve a realistic result coming very close to hand-painted works. Tweak the options, and you can research a variety of oil painting styles. For those in need of more flexibility and having ideas on how the final panting should look, there is a tool called Stroke Direction. This semi-automatic and highly intelligent tool is a real godsend as it gives you full control over the strokes!

The Watercolor style converts a photo into a watercolor painting. Watercolor is one of the most difficult painting techniques and it is hard for a machine to emulate this effect, but ArtWork handles this well. The software lets you create beautiful, airy, and light watercolor paintings which look like realistic paintings.

The Gouache effect lets you create a gouache painting from a photo. It can also make an image look like a tempera picture. Gouache is a versatile painting technique which uses dense intensive colors. Its characteristics are brilliance and opacity. The opacity feature and covering power allow you to create outstanding effects that can not be achieved with the watercolor paints. This technique is widely used in decorative painting and when creating color sketches and drawings.

Next style, the Comics effect, allows you to replicate works of famous comics artists with just a few clicks. This effect reduces the tones of the photo to create an image similar to a poster or a cartoon. You can make a comic strip from your party photos or create an original poster.

The Pen & Ink effect creates ink drawings from digital photos. It is emulating a special technique in which colored inks are applied to paper using a pen - from modern pens to a quill dipped in an inkwell. This style produces graceful images composed of object outlines.

The Linocut effect creates an image in the style of a linocut print. Linocut is a method in which a raised pattern is carved into a piece of linoleum, which is then used with ink to print an image on paper. Linocuts are known for their characteristic expressiveness, strong contrast between black and white, and rich and exuberant strokes. This effect is ideally suited for images of architecture or nature scenes.

Pastel is a special artistic technique which bridges the gap between painting and drawing. The pastel sticks or pencils create soft velvety strokes with subtle edges which can be smeared with your fingers. A distinctive feature of the pastel technique is the "glimmer" of colors.

The software includes ready-to-use AKVIS presets which help you start working. They can be applied "as is" or can be modified. The program lets you save your favorite photo-to-painting settings as a preset and use them in the future. It's possible to import and export your presets.

The virtual painter will take care of converting a digital picture into a painting, but what else makes a painting look like a work of art? Canvas and the artist's signature! ArtWork offers the choice between a flat background and a rough surface (canvas, paper, etc) that makes the impression even more stunning. You can add a signature or an inscription to the picture with your own font and color.