Project Dogwaffle Howler Review

Project Dogwaffle is an interesting paint program that I discovered in the early 2000s while trying to find free or extremely cheap software. I was on a very tight budget as a student, so I had to either find the best programs or risk it with the likes of Kazaa. With Dogwaffle, I didn't have to pay for a fun, feature-filled program. I played around with it, making some tree and meadow themed scenes and weird creatures with the Soft Glow tool. Even made some pictures that had a rather realistic watercolour effect.

Dogwaffle was based on an Amiga paint program, Deluxe Paint, and anyone familiar with that program will likely be comfortable with Dogwaffle. Some aspects of that program took some getting used to, but the features more than made up for the strange setup.

My favourite brushes were the oils, watercolours, and pastels. I loved the way the colours blended, the textures, and the effects of some of the brushes. You can customize the brushes with various settings like scatter, scale by speed and pressure, random size and angle, bleed, and dryout, as well as brush shapes from image files, and bumpmap paper texture settings. The possibilities are endless with or without the layers. You also have custom brush styles with bias and cell size/density, brush fx for weird, cool brushes, and some realistic paint styles like impasto oils, gel, gouache, translucent or opaque watercolour, dropshadows, halftone, and more. I've spent hours playing around with the bleed and lifting effects, and there are still some things I have yet to try.

There are some weird particle, orbicle, bristle, and foliage brushes that are great for experimenting or creating some really cool scenery. The orbicle brushes are animated and create some cool geometric effects, while the bristle brushes have angle controls and other settings that are meant to mimic oil/acrylic brushes with blending and wash. The particle brushes have interesting settings for gravity, mass, velocity, drag, and of course particle density and size - great for leaves or heavy grass, or hair. The foliage brush has some settings for scale, size, lighting, tints, shades, shadows, and even random seed, and is perfect for quick backgrounds or almost anything, really. If the generated branches and leaves are too flat-looking, you can use smudge or blur tools.

Dogwaffle comes with the usual blend/smear settings, but you can customize the smear brushes like you can with others - even use the scatter effect for a convincing blending stump effect. There's also other FX like dodge/burn and blur, sharpen, etc.

The palette wells can seem limiting since each set has only 64, but you can create your own and save them, and there are arrows you can use to browse through the well sets. You can also create palettes by blending colours together, and the Themes feature allows you to create limited palettes that might emphasize certain colour combinations. I didn't know how to use the colour themes at first in Howler, as it works differently from Dogwaffle Particles (the stripped down version). It changes the range of colours available in the colour and harmony wheels. You can also create mixer files, where you mix and create your own custom palettes like with natural media.

What really sold me was Howler's seamless feature. I was really into creating seamless tiling pictures back in the 90s and 2000s, and it was hard doing that with most paint programs because I would have to slice up whatever I put into the square, and often I would make a mistake. Any little mistake could ruin the seamlessness. These days, you can alter the offset of a picture in many programs. Howler makes it even easier with the Transform -> Shift filter. You can use it to shift the picture up and down or from side to side, and either create beautiful tiled graphics for wallpaper backgrounds or for stationery, or even scrapbooking paper, or seamless backgrounds for animations or games. I'm currently trying to create a custom skyline for Sims 2, and for now I'm working with something easy like terrain. Might try making a view from an arcology sometime as well, because I remember how awesome the old arcologies were in Sim City 2000.

There are loads of other filters which I still need to try out, as well as the usual like Gaussian Blur and Posterize. Howler even has Watercolour FX, which can be used to add watercolour paint to a picture or as a standalone. I saw the demonstration and I had to buy. The special $15.99 for the whole kit 'n' caboodle 2025 version of Howler helped, since the usual price is $56.99. If you watch the page, you will often find great deals. That's another great thing about Dogwaffle: You will find total steals. Dan Ritchie even temporarily frees up versions of Howler that are being retired. They may be older builds, but they still work. If you look up on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, you might even find some past free versions that are still available.

As of the writing of this review, Someone had stolen some hardware from Dan Ritchie, which contained a lot of important stuff. He's still recovering from the loss, so if you want to support him, check out his Patreon listed on his PDHowler page.

For Howler, I give it a 10/10. All around great program, a MUST for anyone who wants to get into serious art. Great brushes for any style, and you can even go full Bob Ross and paint some happy trees and clouds and mountains.

If you're into something simpler, I recommend Particle. It's a stripped-down version of Howler, but no less powerful and useful. It doesn't have layers, but it has pretty much all the brush features of Howler. If you're into creating paintings and you just want a simple paint program, Particle 9 is for you. It doesn't have the Shift filter, which means you can't use it to create seamless pictures, but it's great for drawing and painting. You can get it at https://www.pdhowler.com/Particle_9.htm

So check out Dogwaffle - great paint program, awesome deals.