Astropad released the first Windows version of Astropad Studio, software that turns an iPad into a drawing tablet wirelessly communicating with a laptop or desktop. With it, artists can mirror their favorite professional drawing or painting apps on the tablet, including using an Apple Pencil with Windows software.
Free training sessions at Apple Stores ended with the pandemic, but have now moved to YouTube. The first of these online Today at Apple sessions shows how to draw yourself as a Peanuts character.
It’s not complicated — Peanuts characters are relatively simple shapes. Even so, there’s plenty of room for customization. Plus, all the software is free and not even a stylus is required.
Whether you already love to draw, or always wished you could, these courses will show you traditional and creative ways to render your vision. With lifetime access to the coursework, you can learn at your own pace. But you’d better jump on this deal right now if you want to take advantage of a massive 97% price cut on the four-course bundle.
Got a new Apple Pencil? Once the initial novelty wears off, you might find that it spends most of its time magnetically clipped to the side of your iPad Pro or, worse, stuck in the back of a drawer. After all, there are only so many PDFs to annotate and screenshots to mark up.
Which is a great shame, because what your Apple Pencil really wants to do is create art. You only appreciate the true joy of owning one when you draw with it. So, why not follow this handy how-to guide and start sketching lifelike portraits of friends and family? It’s a really fun hobby.
Computers — the iPad, the Mac and anything else where a screen is the main form of interaction — are creativity killers. They distract, frustrate and get in the way of the flow that is essential to any creative work.
That’s not to say they don’t play an important part in art, music, photography or writing. It’s just that a lot of the time, there are much better tools for the job — and they’re getting more popular all the time.
Today’s how-to is a little different. I won’t be recommending special apps for learning how to draw, or even AR apps that help you trace pictures onto real paper. Instead, I’m going to give you a few tips that will help you draw what you see in front of you, whether you’re using a pencil and paper, brush and canvas, or iPad Pro and Apple Pencil.
But first, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you already know how to draw — you just need to learn how to look. The bad news is that the only way to improve is to practice. A lot. There’s no shortcut. You just have to do a lot of drawing.
More than 60 new sessions to teach Apple users how to get the most creatively from their apps and devices will be added to the “Today at Apple” program, the company announced in New York today.
Held at Apple Stores around the world, the sessions offer primers on essential hardware and software in the Apple ecosystem. Each workshop is headed by local creative professionals teaching coding, digital drawing, photography, video and making music.
iOS 12 doesn’t really have any huge new standout features. It’s more a collection of really solid improvements to iOS 11. It sounds odd to say that my favorite new feature is Do Not Disturb during Bedtime, but it’s made a big difference in how I use my iPhone.
Likewise with today’s Pro Tip. iOS markup for screenshots, PDFs and Photos was already good, but new options for the pen tools make it great.
You have a new iPad, and you have a new Apple Pencil. Time to learn how to draw, right? Not necessarily. Just like a regular pen or pencil, there are ton of other things you can do with an Apple Pencil. You can write, of course, but you can also play games, compose musical scores, do coloring in books, edit photos, and even play the Apple Pencil like a musical instrument.
Let’s take a look at the best non-drawing apps for Apple Pencil.
The iPad has replaced many things — it’s a TV, it’s a games console, it’s a book, it’s a (huge) camera, and it’s even a typewriter. But until recently, it hasn’t made a very good alternative to paper. But thanks to the Apple Pencil, and to iOS 11, that has changed. Now you can write and draw a note without even unlocking your iPad, and you can search for anything you write, just as if it were text. Let’s check out lock-screen notes.
The Iconfactory’s Linea Sketch drawing app for iPad just got updated to version 2.0, and it’s a winner. Somehow, the developers have managed to keep the app’s signature simplicity and ease of use, while adding in some essential new features.
If you’re explaining something to another human in person, you’ll often reach for a pencil and paper to make it easier. Perhaps you’re drawing a map, or a quick diagram of that chest of drawers you think would look great in the guest room.
And that’s in person, where gestures and feedback from the listener help communication. Given the limits of email, then, wouldn’t a sketch, chart, or diagram be even more useful? The answer is a resounding “probably,” and the best news you’ll hear today is that it is dead easy to add a drawing to your emails, even without an Apple pencil, and even on an iPhone.
Iconfactory, the awesome team behind apps like Twitterrific and Flare, just launched a stellar new drawing app for iPad. It’s called Linea, and it’s a perfect match for Apple Pencil, offering all the tools you’ll need for sketching, taking notes, and more.
Apple and Nintendo have become a match made in heaven, thanks to the Super Mario Run game that debuted today for iPhone and iPad.
To celebrate the game’s launch, Super Mario Run creator Shigeru Miyamoto showed how he draws the iconic videogame character using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil.
Digital artists know that there’s no substitution for a graphics tablet when trying to draw on your Mac, except maybe the iPad Pro and Pencil.
Astropad co-founder Matt Ronge thinks his company’s $20 app, when combined with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, can match and even exceed the current champ of the tablet world, the Wacon Cintiq.
“iPad Pro is an amazing drawing platform but iOS is far too limited for the professional artist,” says Ronge. “So we wanted a way where we could get the best of both worlds, the power and flexibility of the Mac coupled with the touch interface of the iPad.”
One way I can often determine if an app is worth my time is by putting it through a specific test. If I get so sucked into an app that I forget I’m actually supposed to be gathering thoughts to write up a review, it’s because that app is generally pretty awesome. I had this somewhat rare experience with Recolor, a new coloring book app for adults on iOS.
Most iPad drawing apps take a rather old-fashioned approach. They try to mimic paper and pencil, or paint and canvas, and of course they never get it quite right, even with pressure-sensitive styluses and fancy paint engines. Archipad takes a different approach: it recognizes that you’re drawing on a computer screen and embraces that fact, letting you draw to scale, in 3-D and with perfect lines, all my using a finger or stylus.
Procreate is pretty much my favorite drawing and painting app for the iPad, and v2.0 blows the metaphorical, Cockney-accented doors off the previous version. Yes, it’s now iOS 7-ready, but it’s also now an absurdly powerful images editor, with a whole new interface design to boot.
Drawing apps on the iPad are pretty neat, but it always seemed to me that they cleaved to strongly to the limitations of the physical world. Why, for example, should your piece of virtual paper be limited in size and shape like a piece of paper paper? It shouldn’t. And that’s the premise of Sketchology, a vector app with an almost infinite canvas.
Inkflow 3.0 adds an amazing new feature to the vector-based sketching app: InkPort. Inkport lets you import your paper sketches from the real world and turn them into editable vector art, just using the iPad’s camera.
Back at the end of May I wrote about a great Kickstarter project which updated the Camera Lucida. The Neo Lucida is a prism on a bendy stick that you can use to superimpose the scene in front of you onto a sheet of paper so you can “trace” around real objects.
In the post I wondered if there was an app that would use your iPhone’s camera to do the same thing, but then – as usual – I didn’t read any comments. Reader Golan pointed out that the app is called Camera Lucida, and as of this weekend it has updated to v7.0.
Amaziograph really is amazio-ing. Do you remember the Spirograph, the plastic, cog-based drawing tool that lets you come up with all kinds of psychedelic geometric designs using paper and pens? Or the kaleidoscope, the favorite freakout kids toy of bong-smokers the world over?
Well, imagine that you could somehow combine the two into a smoke-free, drug-free (and more importantly, paper-free) app for the iPad. That app would be Amaziograph, a $1 drawing tool developed by 15-year-old Bulgarian high-schooler Hristo Staykov.