I bought an old surface pro for my 10 year old daughter and she is keen to start “doing art” which is sketching, pattern designing, photo editing etc.
Any recommendations of good starting software? She wanted Procreate but that appears to be Mac only?

Inkscape
GIMP

Artrage

MS Paint.

I am far from arty so take my advice with a pinch of salt.

Many years ago I used a thing called Paint Shop Pro. I remember when it moved from one floppy disk to three. I found it intuitive in a way that many alternatives weren’t. Today I’ve found something that has the same feel as PSP, and that is Paint.NET.

The GIMP is popular but I never really gelled with it, it felt too Linuxy on a Windows platform.

There are alternative skins for GIMP that make it look a little more inviting, but aged that it’s not the most welcoming of apps.

+1 for Paint.net if you want an accessible app that does a bit of everything.

Krita looks interesting too.

My youngest daughter is 14 now and has been using Krita for a couple of years. She seems to get on well with it.

Not free but very cheap. Affinity Photo. As the name would suggest it is also an excellent photo editor. Often in offer at half price so usually costs £25 or so.

TuxPaint

https://tuxpaint.org/download/windows/

Going to try it now 🙂

Tux Paint is great for kids.

Remember to kill the sound….or you become MAD 😉

Thanks. We are going to try Inkscape for vector graphics and Krita for raster graphics to see how we get on. I think a decent ‘pen’ is going to be the most important thing at this stage.

My daughter uses ArtRage and gets on well with it.  I seem to remember paying for it in the end though

I think a decent ‘pen’ is going to be the most important thing at this stage.

Anyone have a recommendation for a pen?