Forge
Stylus primed Stylus firm Adonit’s first app is made for sketching
Stylus manufacturer Adonit’s first app is made for sketching. Find out if it should have stuck to hardware…
Price Free, in-app purchases
Company Adonit
Web www.adonit.net
rating Adonit is better known for styluses than software, but lots of thought has gone into this sketching app, which is (naturally) made to be used with a stylus but works just as well with a finger.
Opening the app displays a virtual wall of projects, each like a mood board containing sketches (created from scratch or imported from your photo album or Dropbox). Sketches can be rearranged, dragged to a screen corner to transfer between projects, or exported as a PNG or PDF. Sadly, though, you can’t zoom to compare sketches side by side.
In sketch mode you work freehand with pressure-sensitive pencil, pen, marker, paintbrush, airbrush or eraser. There’s very little lag, and you can adjust brush size and edit colour swatches. Forge’s biggest appeal, however, is layers. To alter layer opacity you drag layer thumbnails sideways – useful for tracing – and you can ‘pinch’ layers together to merge them and even transfer them between sketches. Brushes can interact naturally or be kept apart on separate layers.
The app gives you the chance to get ideas down and develop them quickly and intuitively. A fine start!
The free version offers up to five layers a sketch; a £2.99 in-app purchase makes them unlimited.
Individual sketches sit alongside each other in a project and can be moved around at will.