Linea

A great sketching tool for the Apple Pencil. $14.99 | LINEA-APP.COM

The iPad is already home to a variety of powerful sketching and painting apps, but Linea is somewhat different. It’s designed to give you just enough in the way of tools to capture your ideas, without overwhelming you with a complex selection that you’ll never use.

Though the iPad’s smooth surface can’t truly mimic drawing on paper, you’ll soon get a feel for Linea’s responses to pressure and the angle of your Apple Pencil, and then turn those into convincing lines using its technical and drawing pencils, felt tip pen and wide tip marker. Where some apps translate pressure to line thickness, Linea more naturally binds it to the darkness of what you draw, and the side of the Pencil’s nib can be used for shading.

As with many other apps, you can twist two fingers on the digital paper to turn it, and double-tapping the lock icon fixes its orientation so your palm doesn’t move it. As your Pencil approaches a toolbar, the interface disappears so you can continue your movement unbroken. Each tool has three thickness settings, and you can spread apart two fingers to zoom in if you need to focus on fine detail or fixes.

You get five layers to work on, which can be merged if needed. We found this limitation imposed a helpful formality on our process. Layer opacities can be adjusted using tiny sliders — designed with Pencil in mind, yet still too small for comfort. Linea’s focus on the basics mostly works, though a ruler and a compass to enable precise lines and circles to be drawn would be a welcome addition.

This is a natural-feeling sketching app, with room to grow while keeping its simple appeal.