The best digital painting
Dabble with virtual paints, pens and more in these easy-to-use art apps for iPad
There’s no more rewarding use for a touchscreen than painting and making art. Whether you’re into pen-and-ink drawing, pencil sketches, watercolours, charcoals and pastels or more esoteric effects, an iPad Pro combined with Apple’s pressure- and tilt-sensitive Pencil is as intuitive as digital art gets. Other iPads and third-party styluses come a close second, and even a rubber-tipped passive stylus, or just your finger, can serve as a brush or a trusty 2B.
In this group test we’ve chosen six of the most best art apps, of which three – ArtRage, Procreate and Tayasui Sketches – are purely for drawing and painting. Pixelmator and Affinity Photo are general purpose image-editing apps that include painting tools, while Procreate is primarily for painting but includes selections and tonal adjustments. In other dedicated painting apps, even simply moving everything down an inch because you started too high up might require exporting the artwork to an image editor, then reimporting your work. With Paper by FiftyThree, cutting and pasting an area is one of a few tools reserved for the Pro subscription, costing £5.49 per six months. Tayasui Sketches’ essential £4.99 in-app purchase brings pressure support, layers and more brush options.
Under canvas
All of these apps store artwork as bitmaps, not vectors, so although you can undo strokes one by one, you can’t select an individual stroke and remove or alter it independently. In Tayasui Sketches, ‘wet’ paints can be smooshed around by new strokes until you ‘dry’ them, which again isn’t reversible later. In this sense, you’re forced to work like a traditional artist: if you want to change something, you’ll have to paint over it, or blank it out with an Eraser tool.
So which apps would have the Mona Lisa smiling, and which are a load of Pollocks? Sign up for our art class to find out.
Some of the apps tested are purely for drawing and painting; others are more general purpose image-editing apps