Sketches Pro

Make your mark with this great drawing application

$19.99 Manufacturer Tayasui, tayasui.com Requirements OS X 10.10 or later

Tayasui’s Sketches Pro is a popular iOS art app, and the fact that it’s made its way to the Mac App Store is a welcome one. But can it deliver on the same streamlined yet versatile experience the mobile version offers?

In a word, yes. This is one of the cleanest, slickest, and most intuitive painting applications you will find, and does away with the need to break from your creativity to figure out how to achieve something.

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the layout, though; the selection of tools cater for just about everything you could need. Each has a selection of options, such as a round or square tip. The app is smart, too – if you select a watercolor brush and don’t have a watercolor layer active, you’re asked if you want one added.

Wet layers act as you might expect, allowing you to blend strokes for a very realistic result. Even smarter, if you’re using a watercolor paper, you can paint a stroke then click inside that stroke to add extra details. This constrains to the initial stroke, unlike a normal paper, where a single click would add a random splat or daub.

Each tool has some element that makes it feel special, from the thickness and opacity controlled by pressure, to the wonderful fill tool, which opens a pop-up library of patterns, all of which have a handcrafted look to them. Choose one, draw a shape and that shape is instantly filled with the chosen pattern, for beautiful crosshatching and print effects.

The selection of patterns has been well thought-out, and if you want to use one to fill an entire layer, a quick right-click-and-drag does it for you automatically.

Essential to any art app is color control, and Sketches Pro doesn’t disappoint. A thin menu of swatches lives in its own tool palette (all of which can be moved around to suit) with a selection of presets, and it’s simple to add more. The standard Photoshop Alt+click works here too, for on-the-fly color picking.

These days, having a good layer system is almost as essential as color controls, and Sketches offers an elegant solution. The palette is simple, with controls for adding layers, layer opacity and visibility, but middle-click and you will see a few of the lesser-used options, including a (small) range of blend modes.

In use, every tool is responsive, smooth and ultimately fun and productive. You right-click to access pop-up size and opacity sliders for each tool, and with simple zooming controls and Photoshop-compliant shortcuts for just about everything, you’re on to a simple but powerful winner.

The only criticism that can be aimed at the developer is the occasionally buggy save dialog, which crashes now and then. Otherwise it’s stable, no matter how complex the drawing, and huge fun. That’s without even mentioning the brilliant smart ruler, the knife tool, or the excellent blender brush.

If you’re a digital artist then this is definitely one to check out. That there’s also an iPad app to work on the go sweetens the deal.

the bottom line. In use, Sketches Pro is a dream. Results look excellent and, other than a small bug, there isn’t much to dislike. Every digital artist should give this a try. Rob Redman