Background links for iPad Explorations: Critical Review
Adobe Illustrator Draw is a vector drawing app designed for quickly sketching out ideas and concepts. Zoom up to 64x to apply fine details and customise your toolbar and brushes. You can 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. Has 13 tools, a digital ruler, and graph guides. You can import your own images or stock photos to work on and for tracing and collage. Using the Creative Cloud connection, you can send a file to Photoshop CC or Illustrator CC on your PC or share your art with the Behance creative community.
Adobe Illustrator Draw
AKSketch is a black & white charcoal drawing app. It’s a simple app designed to make you forget about the tools and just draw, using intuitive multi-touch gestures to help you achieve the desired result. It opens straight to a blank canvas. You can start sketching immediately, using the pinch to zoom gesture to get a bigger or smaller line. Tapping at the bottom of the canvas will bring up the tools menu, which is very basic. You can choose between a smooth or rough brush, and you’ll also get an eraser. The undo and redo tool is handy, and you can also access your other sketches from there.
AKSketch
Artrage: variety of canvas presets and paper options, plus a wide array of brushes, pencils, crayons, rollers, and pastels. 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. Experiment with the ArtRage digital canvas by smearing, blending oils and watercolour. The app is smart enough to detect the roughness of your paper so your pencils can be used for soft shading. Add layers to your work without damaging others with a range of Layer Blend Modes, import photos and convert them to oil for smearing or use as reference images, or trace over images. Once you’ve familiarised 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.The main idea of Artrage is to make painting as real as possible on the iPad. You can mix paints with one another as though you were manipulating them on a real canvas. This app works with layers, and if you’re already familiar with Photoshop, you’ll feel right at home with the blend modes. Artrage also allows you to record your drawing for later viewing on the desktop.
ArtRage Tutorials
ArtStudio: 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.
ArtStudio
Auryn Ink: for watercolour painting. You can pick different tip shapes for the brushes and specify different bristle effects. You can also adjust the texture of the canvas and the amount of water on your brush.
Auryn Ink
Brushes Redux: used by David Hockney. 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. Brushes is fast and responsive to the touch so it’s easy to work quickly. Can record brush strokes. You can only create up to 10 layers.
Comic Draw: by plasq, enables you to build an entire comic narrative inside the app – from concept sketches to colour and lettering. It has a digital sketchpad for original ideas, and also inking and colouring with a variety of brushes to finish your concepts. Lay out different panels on your page and use layers to build your drawings. Add as many pages as you want to create a comic strip, books or even graphic novel. To finish off, add words with Comic Draw’s lettering suite made up of different typefaces, balloons and design tools. Comics can be shared on the on-line community Comic Connect.
Graphic: by Autodesk used to be called iDraw. different brushes and full support for the Apple Pencil, but can create vector-based technical drawings. You can create complex vector-based PDF and SVG files using the powerful pen tool for customised shapes, but also simple diagrams if that’s what you prefer. This app offers layer effects such as shadows, glow, multiple strokes and fills, as well as canvas scale, rulers and units to create dimensions with precision. You can also use classic brush and pencil tools for fluid drawing and sketching.
Inkist: by Tai Shimizue is a painting app with a range of simple, customisable brushes with support for pressure-sensitive styluses.The interface is simple, with minimal taps required to switch between tools, The apps features three layers with blend modes, opacity, and opacity-locking settings. You can then export your work as a PNG, PSD, proprietary ISImage file format and as individual layer files.
Inspire Pro: from Canada-based SnowCanoe’s has 60 high-quality brushes to choose from, divided into six sets: oil paint, airbrushes, basic shapes, graphite pencils, wax crayons and markers. And these can all be used as a wet or dry brush or eraser to create fast and realistic painting, drawing and sketches. Dynamic colour picker Adjusting the paint load and customising brushes (by rotating the bristle pattern) becomes second nature. Add a subtle blur, use Canvas Playback to watch your paintings unfold, use dual textured brushes, customise your canvas size.
Inspire pro
Medibang Paint
MediBang Paint includes many different creative tools for illustrators and comic book artists. Some of these include, numerous brushes, screentones and backgrounds, cloud fonts and comic creation tools. Finally registering on MediBang’s site for free gives users access to cloud storage so they can easily manage, backup and share their work.
Medibang Paint
Paper 53: quick sketches for a selection of virtual journals, with pages to thumb through for easy viewing. Has diagramming and note-taking tools in addition to the standard creative tool suite it’s always had. Tools are a watercolor brush, calligraphy pen, pencil, marker, ballpoint pen, eraser, paint roller, scissors, and a ruler. You can import or take pictures, and mark them up with text or drawings. Upload to FiftyThree’s creative community Mix.
Paper 53
Photoshop Sketch: features 14 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. Export your work to Illustrator or Photoshop CC.
Photoshop Sketch
Pixelmator: to enhance or touch up photography, paint detailed, layered images from scratch. It has more than 90 brushes (including double-texture brushes), watercolours, and the pixel brush. Graphic design features include using blending layers, shapes and text, whilst adding features like shadows, outlines and gradient fills and a range of effects including kaleidoscope.
Pixelmator
Procreate: professional software from Savage Interactive won the Apple Design Award and the App Store Essential. It has a built-in brush editor for creating custom brushes, which enable you to define brush shape and grain. On the Pro, it can go up to 16K resolution with 64-bit color, and you can export your artwork as PSD, PNG, JPG, or Procreate files. The app also lets you record videos of your art and helps you build a portfolio and share your work, if you so desire.
You Tube Procreate Tutorials
Procreate experiments
SketchBook (Autodesk) combines raster and vector features. It has a wide range of digital pencils, pens, markers, and airbrushes with ability to pin toolbars to the screen for easy access. It has text , distort and shape features together with image import and video export.
Sketchbook
SketchBook Ink preset brushes aren’t editable apart from their size, and there are no layers (besides the option to add a photo as a background layer). very high output resolution. You can export images to iTunes at up to 101.5 megapixels (8727 pixels x 11636 pixels) or your Photo app at up to 4096 pixels x 3072 pixels. Although exported files are flat PNGs, not editable vector files, the images are still very high quality.
Sketch Club has a community of artists with whom you can share your art. You’ll also be able to comment on everyone’s work and get inspiration. Lets you create 64 layers in total, and canvases that are up to 4K in resolution. Wide selection of brushes and vector tools, this is a full-fledged drawing app. It has full support for the Apple Pencil and the ability to record in 1080p.
Tayasui Sketches Pro eight brushes along the left-hand side, with pencil, rotring, watercolor brush, felt pen, and eraser for free and more brushes and size, shape and blend controls and paper types to buy. You can import photos, too, if you want. You can organize your sketches and creations into different notebooks in the app.
Sketches Pro
Zen Brush: traditional Japanese calligraphy brushes. 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. Uses black and red ink.
Zen Brush