Mobile devices like iPads and Androids have transformed the way we experience boredom. No longer is a wayward commuter forced to play Snake or Tetris, occupying themselves in a hardly satisfying, and utterly pixelated virtual reality. The tablet or smart phone-wielding travelers can now immerse themselves in an entire library of art and culture-related distractions, finding solace in everything from a Vincent van Gogh game to a digital version of the Louvre.
If you’re an illustrator, artist or graphic designer, you can now work effectively on the move – Painting, sketching, drawing, prototyping and annotating photos.
Whether you want to create a finished painting or artwork or just sketch a rough drawing to finish later on your computer, you’ll find the right art app for you here.
Contents
- 1 Here are best Free and Paid Art Apps every creative and artist type should download now:
- 1.1 1. Inspire Pro
- 1.2 2. Procreate
- 1.3 3.Adobe Illustrator Draw
- 1.4 4. ArtRage
- 1.5 5. Zen Brush 2
- 1.6 6. Affinity Photo for iPad
- 1.7 7. Pixelmator Pro
- 1.8 8. Assembly
- 1.9 9.Photoshop Sketch
- 1.10 10. Graphic
- 1.11 11. Tayasui Sketches
- 1.12 12. Autodesk SketchBook
- 1.13 13. Paper by Fiftythree
- 1.14 14. Art Set
- 1.15 15. Inkist
- 1.16 16. ArtStudio
- 1.17 17. Brushes Redux
- 1.18 18. SketchClub
Here are best Free and Paid Art Apps every creative and artist type should download now:
1. Inspire Pro
Download Inspire Pro US: $7.99
Download Inspire Pro UK: £7.99
Inspire Pro has one of the fastest and most realistic rendering engines on the App Store, delivering a fluid and natural painting, drawing and sketching experience to your iPad.
Sporting 150 brushes – including oil paint, airbrushes, spray paint, pencils, crayons, markers, chalk, charcoal, pastels and paint splatters – Inspire Pro has a wide variety of high-quality and customisable tools for you to choose from.
With Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, the size and opacity of brush strokes react instantly to applied pressure, tilt angle and orientation for unprecedented creative control on a mobile device. Give one of the brushes from the Graphite Pencils set a try with Apple Pencil and iPad Pro and you’ll quickly forget that you’re not using an actual pencil and paper.
2. Procreate
Download Procreate US: $9.99
Download Procreate UK: £9.99
The act of painting in Procreate 4 is even more delightful than previous versions of the software, making it one of the best drawing apps for iPad users. The app incorporates an unobtrusive UI with easy access sliders, which enable you to quickly adjust the size of your brush/opacity as you work. It saves time and lets you concentrate on what you’re painting rather than getting distracted by pop-up menus.
Like many of the other iPad art apps here, there’s an easy-to-use colour picker (with customisable swatches), layer options, a fast and responsive zoom, good smudging/blending options and great undo functionality.
Procreate has over 120 brushes available by default, with 12 pre-set brushes featuring advanced ‘paint loading’ and ‘wetness’ settings for a more realistic look. Plus there’s a built-in a brush editor for creating custom brushes, which enable you to define brush shape and grain.
Procreate is powerful, fast and intuitive, and enables you to create large, complex works of art on your iPad Pro.
3.Adobe Illustrator Draw
Download Adobe Illustrator Draw US: Free
Download Adobe Illustrator Draw UK: Free
Adobe Illustrator Draw is a digital sketchbook that enables you to express yourself in vector format wherever you go. A sister app to Illustrator CC, this drawing tool has a simple UI, designed for quickly sketching out ideas and concepts.
It offers a range of features, including simple vector-based drawing tools with separate drawing and photo layers as well as being able to sync to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. With this feature, you can also download Adobe Illustrator-compatible files and work with them.
The app enables you to draw perfectly straight lines and geometric shapes, rename layers, and use shapes from Adobe Capture CC. An enhanced perspective grid also lets you map shapes to a perspective plane.
4. ArtRage
Download ArtRage US: $4.99
Download ArtRage UK: £4.99
Like the PC and Mac versions, the ArtRage app for iPad art is overflowing with options (we gave ArtRage five stars in our review). There’s a variety of canvas presets and paper options, plus a wide array of brushes, pencils, crayons, rollers, and pastels.
In its quest for realistic art on the iPad, you can paint directly onto the screen or apply a glob of paint with one tool and smear it around with another. ArtRage also features a dedicated watercolour brush option, which can produce some striking effects.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the interface, it’s easy to change brush sizes, bring up the colour picker, work with layers and blend/smudge different elements together.
Unfortunately, there’s some noticeable lag when moving and scaling your artwork. This takes the shine off what is an incredibly flexible painting program for creating iPad art.
5. Zen Brush 2
Download Zen Brush 2 US: $2.99
Download Zen Brush 2 UK: £2.99
The sequel to the popular Zen Brush takes what its predecessor does best – emulating the feel of painting with traditional Japanese calligraphy brushes – and builds upon it, with a new drawing engine that’s smoother and more fluent than before, making it even easier to lose yourself in the process of creating beautiful Zen art.
As well as the new drawing engine, Zen Brush 2 has a gallery feature that enables you to save your work in progress, as well as an ink dispersion effect to give your drawings an added feeling of depth.
There’s support for pressure-sensitive styluses (not to mention Apple Pencil if you have an iPad Pro) and best of all you’re no longer restricted to black ink – now you can use red ink too.
6. Affinity Photo for iPad
Download Affinity Photo US: $19.99
Download Affinity Photo UK: £19.99
Built from the same backend as its award-winning desktop version, Affinity Photo for iPad is fully optimised for iOS 11. Need to work with a Photoshop file? No problem! Affinity Photo supports importing, editing, and exporting of PSD files. It also supports PNG, JPG, TIFF, EPS, PDG, and SVG.
If professional brushes are your thing, Affinity Photo for iPad comes with more than 120 digital brushes including effects, dry media, inks, markers, and more. You can also create your own brushes and switch on dynamics, giving you complete control over pressure, angle, tilt, and velocity.
7. Pixelmator Pro
Download Pixelmator US: $4.99
Download Pixelmator UK: £4.99
If you need a full-fat iPad alternative to Photoshop, Pixelmator is about as good as it gets. Whether you simply want to enhance or touch up some photography, or go the whole hog and paint detailed, layered images from scratch, it has you covered with a heavyweight set of tools, brushes and effects.
It’ll even open layered Photoshop images, so you can start work on your desktop and then carry on with it while you’re on the move. And if you have an iPad Pro you’ll find full Apple Pencil compatibility, featuring palm rejection, pressure, tilt, and acceleration sensitivity.
8. Assembly
Download Assembly US: Free
Download Assembly UK: Free
Assembly is a great way to create detailed vector graphics, icons, logos, scenes and characters without all that fiddly mucking about with vectors and Bézier curves.
Rather than painstakingly draw everything out yourself, you can choose from an enormous selection of ready-made shapes and stick them together to create your vector masterpiece.
You can layer, stack and position shapes however you want, and even create your own building blocks by cutting out, combining and intersecting existing shapes. If you need to prototype in a hurry, it’s an ideal tool for getting professional results fast.
9.Photoshop Sketch
Download Photoshop Sketch US: Free
Download Photoshop Sketch UK: Free
Rather than try to recreate the full Photoshop experience on iPad, Adobe has instead focused on the platform’s strengths to provide a powerful tool for sketching and painting. Photoshop Sketch features tools including a graphite pencil, ink pen and watercolour brushes, with adjustable size, colour, opacity and blending settings.
You can layer and rearrange your images, use perspective and graph grids to help align your creations, and there’s support for pretty much any stylus you care to think of.
And you can export your work to Illustrator or Photoshop CC. Naturally you’ll need a Creative Cloud account (subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud here), but if you’re planning on using Photoshop Sketch as a stand-alone app then you’ll only need the basic free version.
10. Graphic
Download Graphic US: $8.99
Download Graphic UK: £8.99
Promising a desktop-class standard of editing, Graphic has been touted as the iOS answer to Adobe Illustrator. As well as containing all of the drawing tools you need to create amazing art and detailed technical drawings, Graphic now comes with variable-width brush strokes and pressure-sensitive drawing support for the Apple Pencil.
Developed by Indeedo, this easy-to-use iPad app is compatible with both the Mac and iPhone versions via iCloud and Dropbox, letting you save your masterpieces on the go for straightforward editing across devices later down the line.
11. Tayasui Sketches
Download Tayasui Sketches US: Free
Download Tayasui Sketches UK: Free
Tayasui Sketches is one of the most delightfully simple drawing and painting iPad apps that we’ve found. It features eight brushes along the left-hand side, ranging from pencil and charcoal to felt pen and watercolour brush, with a further two available in the pro version.
Each one exhibits its respective characteristics brilliantly, meaning it’s simple to just pick a brush and start sketching. Although limited in terms of editing options, they’re a delight to use, and in the pro version you’re at least able to increase the size and shape as well as edit the blend mode.
12. Autodesk SketchBook
Download SketchBook US: Free
Download SketchBook UK: Free
SketchBook by Autodesk is one of the most popular iPad paint apps with digital artists. As you’d expect from Autodesk, SketchBook has all the swagger of a pro-grade painting program, but with an experience designed for those looking to create art on the iPad.
There’s a wide range of digital pencils, pens, markers, and airbrushes to choose from, all accessed via a simple but intuitive UI that lets you pin toolbars to the screen for easy access.
It’s flexible and fast, too, enabling you to work with layers, transparency options, annotations and advanced blend modes. With Dropbox integration plus the ability to import and export Photoshop-friendly files, it’s an ideal iPad art app for working on the move. With a good stylus, a good digital artist can create a variety of art on the iPad, from a quick sketch to a more involved and detailed digital painting.
13. Paper by Fiftythree
Download Paper by Fiftythree US: Free
Download Paper by Fiftythree UK: Free
If you’re looking for something to make quick sketches with, with the minimum of fuss, then Paper by Fiftythree is well worth checking out. Its uncluttered interface – no menu bars or buttons here – strips back the sketching experience to the bare essentials and turns your iPad into a selection of virtual journals, with pages to thumb through for easy viewing.
Designed exclusively for landscape mode, this iPad art app is no good for creating polished pieces, but to get down quick sketch concepts when creating art on the iPad it’s definitely worth a look.
14. Art Set
Download Art Set US: $1.99
Download Art Set UK: £1.99
This cool paint app is like having a virtual art set inside your iPad. Having made it to number one paid iPad app in over 30 countries since its release, Art Set has all the tools an artist could possibly want, including chalks, charcoal, oil pastels, wax crayons, graphite pencils, coloured pencils and marker pens.
The multitouch pinch and zoom functionality enables you to add fine detail with ease. You can also choose from different paper colours and textures, or import your own photos.
15. Inkist
Download Inkist US: Free
Download Inkist UK: Free
Inkist benefits from a simple but stylish interface that’s been designed to be highly responsive and artist-friendly.
In the app, which is based on its Mac cousin, you build up layers of colour and flatten them down on the background rather than relying on multiple layers. Although it might not be to everyone’s taste, for many traditional artists, this will be of real benefit.
Inkist has a range of simple, customisable brushes. Support for pressure-sensitive styluses is available natively (accessible through the ever-present tool palette) so you do have some more flexibility with your strokes, although with a standard stylus we found simple, quick taps were not always tremendously effective.
16. ArtStudio
Download ArtStudio US: $4.99
Download ArtStudio UK: £4.99
While its interface isn’t as intuitive as some of the other drawing apps for iPad listed here, ArtStudio for iPad rewards patient exploration of its features. And it’s jam-packed with them.
There are over 20 different brushes, various different canvas sizes and options that include layers, layer masks, filters and effects. ArtStudio also includes step-by-step drawing lessons/tutorials plus the handy ability to export your artwork to Photoshop for further fiddling.
17. Brushes Redux
Download Brushes Redux US: Free
Download Brushes Redux UK: Free
Legendary artist David Hockney has been spotted using the Brushes app when creating art on the iPad. It’s an oldie but a goodie, designed specifically for Apple’s tablet and now updated with the ‘Redux’ suffix – and it’s free.
Using a basic toolbar at the bottom of the screen, you can bring up a colour wheel/picker, work with layers and switch between various brushes. Best of all, perhaps, Brushes is fast and responsive to the touch so it’s easy to work quickly.
A useful feature of Brushes is the ability to record each brush stroke, enabling you to play back exactly how you created each piece of iPad art via the Brushes viewer.
18. SketchClub
Download Sketch Club US: $2.99
Download Sketch Club UK: £2.99
Sketch Club has a great set of tools for creating beautiful digital art. The app has a unique set of flexible digital brushes (44 in total, but more can be made), pens, vector tools, old school pixel art, and fun procedural tools.
Sketch Club has an uncluttered user interface, with lots of settings to customise the app to your own unique preferences.
A particularly great feature of this app is the integrated online community. Here you can upload your sketches to let others rate and comment on your work, as well as enter daily challenges and fun weekly competitions.
Originally published on: iPad art apps for painting
