From specialized Photoshop palettes to a gesture drawing applications these 6 tools are essential for the 2D artist.

Colour Constructor

Have you ever wanted a way to work out what shadow and lit colours you are supposed to use in your painting?

Colour Constructor is a study and workflow tool that is designed to help you design the colours and values for a painting or image you are making according to a light source and ambient term.

Paint with confidence, without needing to always rely on photographic reference.

GestureDrawing! 3

GestureDrawing! is by far our favorite gesture drawing tool of all times. This standalone app for Windows and Mac is the closest thing to a real life drawing session right in the comfort of your office. Import the included reference images (or import your own) and create custom sessions to really level up your skills in the most effective way possible.

GestureDrawing! 3 is introducing cool and useful new features!

• Breaks - Drawing can be a physically and mentally exhausting activity and taking a break every now and then can help you boost your productivity and keep focus. With that end, you can now schedule break times in your drawing sessions!
• Grids - Having a grid over your references can help you study proportions and composition
• Random Image Flipping - You can tell the app to randomly flip the images horizontally and vertically to get the most out of your references or for an extra challenge
• Volume Slider- For a better volume control

Prisma Palette

Prisma Palette is a revolutionary new idea in artist's tools; a painter's palette based on physics, that generates different palettes for lit and shadowed areas.

It generates individual gamut masks for any number of light sources; mapping exact local colours to lit colours within the colour space.

Features:

• The most advanced gamut map generator on the market
• Generate mathematically correct colour palettes within a lit space
• Reverse engineer local colours from lit colours
• Workflow optimized for painting with as little interruption as possible
• Three picker modes with live updating of position
• Shortcut key to toggle lights
• High Performance, with realtime updating of all sliders
• Free updates

Chameleon Adaptive Palette

The newly updated version now features palette-only lock thanks for user requests!

• Colors can now be dragged from anywhere to the User Strips!
• Los of extra Ui love

For Photoshop CC2015.5+

Chameleon is a culmination of many features from Cubebrush store owner Rico Holmes' extensions, collected and refined into one panel. Each of the strips provides a different color function, but they all have the same principle. They automatically and intelligently generate ranged colors swatches or palettes based on the one you just selected.

They can be locked to act as a static palette, or unlocked to dynamically give you variation.

Unique Chameleon Features:

• Single Panel - A panel that can be placed anywhere, docked anywhere, and adopt any dimensions. From microscopic to full-screen. Fully Retina Friendly.
• Direct Color Control of Solid Color and Vector Shape Layer - No more delving into additional color requesters to change colors of fill objects. If your current layer is a vector shape or Solid color etc; a single click on a Chameleon color will change that layer contents instantly.
• User Color Strips - Now you can add or remove your own color with the user strips. Double click to add, Alt-click to remove. They can be dragged around and Chameleon will fill in the gaps with in-between gradients on the fly!

The UI is extensively designed to be minimal, can be docked with any native panels, scaled to your hearts content, minimise, iconizes etc. You can even switch individual swatch ranges off if they're no use to you. The panel takes no CPU time while painting and remembers all your settings between sessions.

Brusherator

What is Brusherator?

In several words, it is a Photoshop panel that allows you to have brush and tool presets, actions and scripts on it.

In further detail, Brusherator is a system of several panels and scripts that will allow you to work with high efficiency and speed. It's not a brush manager for you instruments that will spit all the tools you have to you, but rather like a highly customisable surgeon table when you have all the tools you need for particular task in the right places. And you can have several tables for different tasks. And also you can switch between them in a press of the button.

Perspective Tools v2

Perspective Tools is an incredible Photoshop addon that reall y makes you wonder why it's not part of the base program!

You can create perspective and parallel grids in one click, easily transform layers in perspective and unwrap perspective distortion to a plane with PT2. It's not only a massive time saver but it also makes perspective easy to use for everyone.

Available for Photoshop CS6 and up!