The box to my copy of MetaCreations Painter Classic is…very late 90s. Look! Tiled background patterns for the web!! And just, the overall design. It’s dated 1998. This used to be one of /the/ cool inexpensive things to art with, and those kinds of backgrounds were all over the place.
This was before Corel ate Painter, and actually a pretty good stripped-down version, other than the lack of layers other than the separate watercolor one.
Sometime I need to figure out why my XP virtual machine lost its understanding of pressure sensitivity…I had the tablet working properly before! I miss this and Paint Shop Pro 6, another thing that used to be SUPER COOL for making GRAPHICS if one couldn’t afford Photoshop (which of course grants magical art and photoediting skills). These days there’s a lot more genuinely good free and inexpensive options for most tasks, but I really really like the way PSP handles hard edged/pixely brushes with a tablet.
