Recent upgrades to Serif's veteran drawing program have moved away from traditional vector graphics tools, into areas such as the 'natural media' paintbrush styles that appeared in Drawplus 8 in 2006.

However, Drawplus X2 is more of a back-to-basics upgrade that very much puts its focus onto vector drawing tools once more.

There are some quite basic changes, such as the Pen tool's ability to draw either 'smooth joins' or 'sharp joins'. When you use the pen to draw on screen you can set it to create either sharp, angular joins between lines, or smoother, more curved joins. This allows you to adjust your drawing style depending on the needs of a particular project.

You can also edit objects more quickly by holding the Control key down and clicking on lines or corners, and then just dragging them into the required position. Neither of these features is particularly eye-catching, but people who create a lot of hand-drawn artwork will appreciate the improved efficiency they bring to the drawing process.

In a similar vein, there's a new freeform tool that lets you quickly change an object by clicking on it and then drawing over the original shape. You can also use the new Knife and Eraser tools to either slice objects in two, or simply erase parts of an object altogether, while leaving the remaining elements as editable vectors. Again, these features make it easier to edit your work, so you feel like you have more freedom to experiment and change things as you go along.

Drawplus also takes some tentative steps into 3D. You can draw any 2D shape - such as a simple rectangle - and then click the Instant 3D button to convert it into 3D (so the rectangle becomes a cube). These 3D objects can be rotated, and you can also apply effects such as a bevel or lathe to carve the object into a slightly different shape - these features are fairly limited, but they could come in handy for creating simple 3D artwork such as a company logo.

However, the biggest single addition to Drawplus X2 is its new keyframe animation facility. You could create animations in previous versions of Drawplus, but had to do so one frame at a time. The new Keyframe features allow you to change the way your artwork looks at specific key frames within a sequence and the program will then automatically calculate all the in-between frames (a process known as tweening that is commonly used by animation software).

This will be a huge timesaver for anyone who wants to create simple 2D animations, such as banner ads or animated logos for a web page. You can export your animation as a video file (Quicktime or Windows AVI) or as a Flash animation for use on the web.

Our only real criticism is that the program's manual and Help files are a bit of a mess. The printed manual commits the cardinal sin of simply listing features without explaining how they actually work together to create an illustration. There are some tutorials as well, but these are split between the program's How To palette and a series of PDF files, and we found it difficult to get a feel for the animation features as we were constantly switching between the manual and the various help files.

Even so, Drawplus X2 provides a good range of drawing and animation tools at a competitive price, and itís worth exploring if youíre looking for a cheaper alternative to professional tools such as Adobe Illustrator or Coreldraw.