Painting On The iPad

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Procreate has more power than you'll probably ever need.
Procreate has more power than you'll probably ever need.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that the iPad was going to be great for drawing. Writing in cursive on a capacitive screen is still an exercise in frustration, but for drawing and painting the iPad is a legitimate new medium, like oils, charcoal or gouache. It even brings something genuinely new to the game: light. Unlike all other painting methods (except perhaps matte painting for the movies), the iPad’s paintings actually glow.

There are many, many painting and drawing apps in the App Store, so here I’ll write about my favorites.

Procreate

Procreate is the app I use when I paint on my iPad. When I went to a life-drawing class a couple months back in Berlin, I took my iPad mini and my finger along. After getting over the disappointment of a last-minute switch from a female model to an (admittedly hot) male model, and also convincing said model that I wasn’t pointing my iPad’s camera at him, I got some pretty good results.

Procreate distinguishes itself by being easy to use yet powerful. After a brief learning curve, where you discover some of the “hidden” controls (the layers panel was something of a dark art in earlier versions), it all but disappears. The brush size and opacity controls are persistent at the screen edge, and you can long-press to bring up a color picker. Pro tip for all painting apps that have this feature: Paint a few swatches of your colors into the corner and you can quickly sample them with a ling press. This is a lot like having a palette of paints when painting in oils.

Procreate also lets you import images from the camera roll or Dropbox, to use various pressure-sensitive styluses, and to record your paintings so you can play back the creation process step-by-step.

But what really makes it my go-to app is that it’s so easy to use. Head to the settings and you can see a section explaining all the gestures available. Undo/redo, clear layer, zoom; plus a whole lot of gestures to use when doing things like managing layers. This means that you never really have to stop painting and think about the interface. Kind of like a real canvas and paint.

Brushes

Brushes, one of the originals, and still one of the best.
Brushes, one of the originals, and still one of the best.

Brushes was one of the first drawing apps for the iPhone, and then the iPad, and it’s still one of the best. Brushes first distinguished itself by great brush feel, and it still has that. The basics of the app are similar to any other painting app, but Brushes has, well, great brushes. The textures are excellent, and the responsiveness is top-notch, and it really is an app you can lose yourself in for hours, painting away and zooming onto the details over and over. I lost many hours to the app when I first loaded it onto an iPad, although these days I prefer Procreate, as the brushes are more plentiful and, well, now I’m just plain used to Procreate, which counts for a lot.

Still, Brushes remains the only app that, as far as I know, was used to paint a New Yorker magazine cover.

Vector Apps

All of these painting apps are bitmap apps. That is, a 1000×1000-pixel canvas has 1,000,000 pixels. And if you zoom in past a 1:1 view, those pixels will get blocky or blurry.

If you use a vector app like Inkpad or iDraw, then your strokes are described in terms of length and direction. If you sketch a straight line that is 200 pixels long and 20 pixels wide and runs at 40 degrees from the horizontal, it can be described mathematically. And when you blow the picture up to the size of the building, those same lines and shapes can be mathematically expanded too, redrawn at the new size with no pixel artifacts. This also means that file sizes are usually much smaller, as they don’t need to record every pixel’s color.

Inkpad
Vectors! Thousands of 'em!
Vectors! Thousands of ’em!

My favorite of the two is Inkpad, and it’s also the only one of the pair that has been updated for iOS 7 (iDraw’s last update was way back in February 2013). Inkpad is from Taptrix, the folks behind seminal iPad painting app Brushes (more on that in a sec).

The best thing about Inkpad is that you don’t need to know anything about vectors to use it. Anyone who has had to learn Adobe Illustrator will know how frustrating vector apps can be. Inkpad on the other hand is as intuitive as a bitmap painting app. You can paint strokes onto the canvas, and then, because they’re vectors, you can grab the little Bezier handles and adjust the length, the shape and son on. Everything you’ll need is there, including text tools, layers, blend modes, and tools for arranging all the elements by depth.

You can also import photos (although clearly you can’t do any vector voodoo on them).

But the best part of Inkpad is like the best part of Procreate: ease of use. Somehow the app seems to just know when you want to select a whole shape with a tap, or to just drag one corner of a line over a few pixels. The toolbar can be dragged anywhere, and it runs like a flash (although not like Flash, thank God) even on an underpowered iPad mini, and you can even use the camera to grab quick snaps for reference purposes.

Inkflow

Inkport in action.
Inkport in action.

Here’s a radical idea: what about using a pen and paper to draw, and then somehow adding that to your iPad for editing? That’s the idea behind Inkflow. Or rather, that’s one small feature of Inkflow, a note-taking app for the iPad.

Inkflow is a drawing app in its own right, although it’s really aimed more at sketching and handwriting than at full-on painting. There are several brushes, plus colors, zoom and editing features, and even a text tool. But it’s the vector import which makes the app really special.

Draw your pictures or diagrams on paper, using color if you like, and then use the “Inkport” feature to import your sketch using the iPad’s camera. It is converted into Inkflow’s vector format on import, and you can then select and resize the picture as you like. You can’t edit and adjust the lines like you could in an actual vector app, but it’s a pretty great way to mix paper and pixels.

It’s also free, although you’ll have to pay to get brushes, colors and Inkport.

Tayasui Sketches
Sketches is beautifully minimal.
Sketches is beautifully minimal.

Tayasui Sketches is a minimal sketching app, although that doesn’t mean that it’s missing features. Rather, it offers the usual set of tools, only it does it in a very unobtrusive manner.

The tools are standard – pens, pencils, brushes – but in the same way that Penultimate offered the best iPad ink for a long time, so Sketches has a fantastic painting engine. The airbrush is especially good.

The IAP adds a color-picker tool (long press to bring up the loupe), more brushes and brush controls (wet vs. dry, different tip sizes). Whatever the paid status of your copy, you can export pictures by flicking them into an envelope (it’s pretty cute) and zoom/undo/redo/move with pinches and swipes.

Like many of these apps, Tayasui Sketches is free, and the extras come in the form if an in-app purchase. Many people moan about this, and I would prefer it if I didn’t have to restore my damn purchases every time I reinstall it, but IAPs are the modern equivalent of demo periods, so we should just quit our whining already.

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