I recently bought a graphics tablet for my PC, and I must say I'm very happy with it. I've always liked drawing and computers, and a gadget like this was the perfect link between two of my favorite pastimes. After installation and initial set-up, I spent some time searching for the appropriate software to make the most out of my new toy. Besides Adobe Photoshop (which works great with pressure-sensitive input devices like my tablet) there are also other drawing editors you may not know about. Here are five free art apps:

Drawing by Agrianti, an ArtRage user

Artweaver - Includes a dozen customizable brushes that recreate different drawing tools:  oils, pencils, charcoal, chalk, acrylics, felt pens and more. It also has support for layers and transparency and a history window that lets you undo any previous action.

TwistedBrush - This free app doesn't has as many features as its full version, but makes up for it with a bunch of great features: lots of brushes to choose from, support for layers, photo cloning and tracing, pattern, textures and more. And it does feel like actual painting on canvas!

ArtRage - Delivers an impressively realistic canvas feel when drawing on your tablet. The latest release includes tools like watercolor, glitter sprinkling and sticker spray. You can also trace a real image and turn it into  a beautiful drawing - even if you're not very artistically-gifted.

Flowpaint - Though it's not the best drawing apps around here, Flowpaint still lets you grasp the feeling of actual drawing tools when using digital brushes on the computer. It doesn't require installation and runs under Java.

Greenfish Painter - Not as fully-featured as other drawing apps, but still a reasonably good piece of software to use as virtual canvas. You can freely paint on its interface, mix different colors on your palette like in real life and tweak brushes to meet your needs.

If you're struggling with the 'proper' subjects at school you've always got art class to fall back on. Here you can forget all about algorithms, algebra and Archimedes and mess about with paints instead. If you really want to make the most of the subject though, you need to get kitted out for the world of digital art. There is such a broad range of graphics software out there that it can be tricky to know where to look. I've picked out a few of the best ones for each level of academia.

Primary: All the great masters started their careers by doing coloring, and it's important to get a grip on how to stay within the lines from a young age. If you don't want to upset Mum by spilling paint on the carpet or getting felt pen all over the table then why not do all your coloring on the computer? I know it sounds crazy, but computer programs such as Kea Coloring Book or Connected Kids Coloring Book let you learn the craft without making a mess. Once you've perfected the art of coloring why not expand your talents to making writing look pretty? textArt allows you to apply various cool typography effects to text, simply by selecting an effect from a drop-down menu and choosing colors.

Secondary: High school is the place where your abstract blobs are transformed into works that actually look like something else from real life. There are some quality drawing tools around that can be picked up with just a bit of practice. Corel Painter might be a good place to start as it allows you to take real photos and very easily change them into paintings though its Photo Painting palettes. OpenCanvas is another good quality art app with a gentle learning curve. There are loads of different brushes, pens and pencils, so you can really get creative. However, perhaps my favorite of all is ArtRage, which I feel gets just the right balance between user friendliness and powerful artistic tools.

College: If you choose to pursue art after leaving school, either in further education or as part of your career, then you'll probably need to add to your arsenal of software. The weapon of choice for most in the graphic art industry is Adobe Illustrator, which provides a wide range of advanced tools and integrates nicely with that other bastion of the image editing world, Photoshop. If you're looking for a creative new tangent to explore then perhaps you could also try Context Free Art, an app that allows you to generate images by entering code. No matter how good you are technically though, you will always have periods where your ideas dry up. When this happens, you can always get some inspiration by customizing your computer around the works of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, or Cezanne.

Paintbrush is top download for Mac on Softonic this week and even though that's a bit of a surprise considering all the great programs you can find out there, it goes to show that drawing applications remain popular for Mac users. You can use them to sketch up things for work, as a fun tool for your kids or simply for your own enjoyment. We decided to select the top drawings applications on Mac and let you know what makes each one different from the other. Please let us know if there's any one we missed or if in particular that you really like.

• DrawIt - Select from one of the multiple templates available and learn how to use tools like Bezier or masks. DrawIt includes up to 40 image filters and all sorts of brushes.
• iDraw - Very intuitive, this application is great to draw up designs or animations. It offers up many shapes and editing tools like scaling, tapering or bulging.
• Intaglio - A simple drawing tool for beginners which builds on the 2D graphics and scripting capabilities of Mac OS X.
• Paintbrush - Basically a clone of Microsoft Paint for Mac, it's easy to use and great for kids to learn how to draw.
• ArtRage - A cool sketching tool that makes your screen feel and look just like a canvas.
• Lineform - Winner of the 2006 Apple Design Award, this is a beautifully designed tool to create diagrams and illustrations.
• ZeusDraw - Vector drawing at its best with a smooth interface and a great number of brushes to choose from.

I was really interested in buying Andy Warhol's portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, then I heard it was expected to fetch in the region of $25 million. I decided not to bother bidding and instead got hold of some artistic downloads and turned my PC into a kind of digital art gallery. There are plenty of painting wallpapers around that you can use to decorate your desktop background. Besides finding one of Warhol's Skull paintings, I also came across some classic works by Da Vinci, Dali and Liechtenstein.

I next wanted something impressive to hang on my screen while I was away from the computer. The 100 Great Works screensaver collects some of the most important paintings in history and presents them in the form of a full-screen slide show on your display. Another, more interactive, option is Paintball Screensaver, which lets you loose with a globe of paint to create your own semi-impressionist works.

If you feel inspired by all this art then why not get a brush out and get drawing? But forget all that messy, expensive paint and canvas malarky and get yourself an application that lets you make your mark with pixels instead. Artrage and Artweaver are two great free painting tools to get you started, after which you can progress to more high-end professional art apps such as Corel Painter or OpenCanvas. You never know, one day you might get a few million for your own creations.