Here I am playing with Serif DrawPlus X3. As there is no demo I decided to buy it with my own hard earned cash. They have an unconditional 30 day money back guarantee but I don’t think I’ll take them up on it. The Program is similar to Xara Xtereme in a lot of ways but with a whole bunch of extras that users of the Xara product have been begging for for years and some that I wish we had been begging for. Top of my list are more extensive drawing tools, CMYK profile support (kind of irrelevant as Vista broke my Colourometer), Solo mode (Isolates the bits you want to work on), Natural media brushes, mesh fill,cut tool, Lasso selection, fill paintbrush – the list goes on. One thing that makes me pathetically happy is the ability to open a file and have the document match to it’s size. This means I can just open up roughs and be good to go, with out having to mess around re-sizing.

Bad points? There are a couple.

Not enough keyboard short cuts, I didn’t realise how many of these I use.

Most of the Brushes seem to be bitmaps that can’t be broken apart There is the fill brush but that doesn’t give nice smooth thick and thin lines.

The brushes seem to be a bit rough and fill in at small sizes

It crashes occasionally.

I am enjoying playing with the new features and the support is excellent, Serif seem to be really interested in improving the app. I also don’t actually use lines all that much in my Illustration style. So. Will I switch………..

Only time will tell