Make art on your iPhone
Unleash your creative side by using 3D Touch to vary your strokes
REQUIRES > iPhone 6s, Canvas
LEVEL > Easy
IT WILL TAKE > 30 minutes
the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are equipped with a 3D Touch display that’s able to detect the pressure you apply to the screen and relay that information to apps.
Apple designed 3D Touch to allow new gestures, but clever developers have taken advantage of the pressure sensitivity to create apps that use 3D Touch in novel ways. Canvas (Free, appsto.re/
i6S57ZS) is one such app. In some ways it’s like many other drawing apps: you sketch on the screen using your finger or a stylus and the app recreates the effect of brush strokes.
What makes this app special is that it uses 3D Touch to measure how firmly you are pressing on the screen, and responds accordingly: firmer pushes produce thicker brush strokes.
3D Touch doesn’t offer all the features of an Apple Pencil; you can’t use the side of a stylus to shade in your drawings, for example. But it’s a better experience than painting without pressuresensitive response. Canvas is a fantastic way to create drawings when you don’t have more capable tools to hand, and 3D Touch offers an extra level of interaction that makes it more believable as digital paint and a canvas.
Setting up the app to make use of 3D Touch is remarkably easy because you don’t actually need to do anything – you can just open the app and start painting, pushing gently for a light stroke or more deeply for a dark one. Canvas includes four brushes as standard. A $2.99 In-App Purchase unlocks five more brushes and the ability to paint on up to 10 layers.
Canvas has a comprehensive color picker that provides you with the ability to pick out schemes, such as analogous, triad and complementary groups of colors. The picker makes it easy to find colors that work well together. Tap the Themes option and you’ll find dozens of premade color schemes, too.
You can also adjust the size and opacity of your brushes, and your creations can be exported as layered Photoshop files, or as flat PNG or JPG files. You can even record video of your work as you draw.