Serif DrawPlus X6 review

Another familiar feature is the Keyframe Animation Studio. These can be exported as videos or in Flash format and offer a fun, if limited, way of creating simple cartoons. It comes with a large gallery of objects that you can animate by plotting them along a vector line. It doesn’t take long to get to grips with it either, and it took us just a few minutes to paint a rough background and create a bee flying across the screen. Its layering system is a little counter-intuitive compared to the main drawing studio, though, as you can’t re-arrange individual objects in the Layers tab. Instead, you have to use the Arrange tab, but without the benefit of being able to see how each object fits on top of the other.

Using the stencils was great fun, but adjusting individual vector lines was a little more temperamental

Our favourite new feature was the Stencil Tab. There are a wide range of templates, which are divided into Alphabet, Artistic and Shapes, and you can also create your own. It also complements the Auto-Trace Studio feature particularly well. Here, you can import images from your hard drive and instantly turn them into vector drawings using its handy menu settings. Since vectors are easily scalable, images retain their sharpness no matter how you size them, and the stencils add an extra layer of experimentation.

Sadly, a few bugs and irritations we noticed in DrawPlus X5 still haven’t been ironed out, and chief among these is its slow response times. We were surprised by this, as one of DrawPlus X6’s main improvements is being able to support 64-bit Windows operating systems. Nevertheless, edits often didn’t appear onscreen until we zoomed in or out, and large parts of the screen were very slow to refresh when dragging individual nodes around the page. Creating an image with more than 200 brush strokes also took its toll, and our image would regularly break up while refreshing when we added more lines. DrawPlus X6 also crashed twice, and while it managed to recover both of the images on which we were working, it didn’t recover the edits we’d made in the 15 minutes or so before the crashes.

DrawPlus X6 isn’t perfect, but it does its best to make itself user-friendly. It has a clear layout, and there are an extensive number of free tutorials available online to help you get started, but its number of small frustrations will put off more serious graphic designers. Still, if you’re looking for cheap vector-drawing software, then Serif DrawPlus X6 could be the program for you.