If you have a tablet and want to express your creativity, there are plenty of great apps you can use to pass the time doodling or to create beautiful digital art. If you have a stylus, they're even easier to use, but most of them only require a steady finger and a good imagination to make something beautiful. This week we're going to look at five of the best tablet drawing apps, based on your nominations.
How I Started Using Sketch App In Windows. Sketch is an amazing app for Mac that allows you to easily create stunning designs, mostly for UI and UX designers. As Bohemian Coding (creators of. IPad Drawing App Best Drawing App for iPad. MyBrushes iPad drawing app is a revolutionary, best drawing app for iPad infinite canvas. With My Brushes drawing app for ipad, digital artist will have a natural drawing experience as close to pencil, pen, marker, or brushes on real papers. My Brushes App is the most powerful and intuitive drawing program for iPad and Mac.
Earlier in the week, we asked you which tablet drawing apps you used when you felt creative. You responded with some great nominations, and now we're back to take a look at the top five.
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Best Tablet Drawing App?
Whether you have an iPad or an Android tablet, you've probably been tempted to doodle a bit on …
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The poll is closed and the votes are counted! To find out who took the top prize, head over to our weekly hive five followup post to see and discuss the winner!
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Most Popular Tablet Drawing App: Sketchbook Express/Mobile/Pro
Whether you just want to doodle on your tablet, or you want to make a few quick sketches or notes,…
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Sketchbook Express for iOS/Express for Android/Mobile for Android/Pro/Pro for Android (iOS: Free/$4.99, Android: Free/$1.99/$4.99)
Autodesk's Sketchbook series comes in multiple flavors for multiple platforms, and in each one of them you get a clean UI, plenty of tools to make your ideas come to life on your tablet's display even if you're using the free versions of the app, a full multi-touch interface that works best with a stylus (but doesn't require one), layers, tons of brushes, pens, and drawing tools, and the ability to undo and redo—all things you would expect from a well built drawing app. If you want more brushes or tools, you can always get more via in-app purchases. When you're finished with your masterpiece, you can save it to your gallery or photo roll or share it with the world.
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Paper (iOS: Free)
Paper is iOS only, but it's made waves for its unique and beautiful approach to a drawing app. Create your notebooks based on date, theme, or whatever you want to draw, and set to work. You get some basic brushes and colors out of the gate, so it's perfect for idle doodling, but you unearth the app's real potential pretty quickly when you start playing with watercolors and the app's multiple pen and brush styles. Finally, your work is saved as you progress inside of the app, but you can always share your photos with friends on Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr. Paper is completely free—all of the additional brushes, notebooks, features, and tools are available in the app through in-app purchases when you need them, and you can try them before you buy.
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Procreate (iOS: $4.99)
Procreate earned high praise from many of you for being immensely feature rich, fast, and full of tools for the price you pay to get it. The app offers hundreds of drawing and illustration tools packed into a streamlined interface, including 16 layers to your images and the ability to control them all, a wealth of brushes and drawing tools and the ability to tweak those brushes and styles with dozens of options, 100 undo/redo strokes, auto-saving while you draw, all wrapped up in a gorgeous UI that makes being creative that much more fun. When you're all fnished, you can save your work to your gallery, or you can even export your image to Adobe Photoshop so you can take over on the desktop.
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Artrage (iPhone: $1.99/iPad: $6.99)
ArtRage for iPhone and iPad do a great job at bringing the long-standing and popular ArtRage for Mac and Windows to tablet screens. The app combines a natural drawing interface with tons of brushes and other painting and drawing tools you may be accustomed to using on canvas or paper. Sure, you have a paintbrush and a pen, but you also have a palette knife, watercolor brush, and the ability to control all of those brushes while you work. Select whether you're working on canvas or paper, with watercolors, oil, or acrylic paint, even reference images to 'tape' on your canvas to look at while you work or trace in pencil. Where other drawing apps walk the line between being an illustration studio combined with a causal doodling tool, Artrage very much a serious painting and drawing tool. Don't let the price tag fool you, it's feature-packed, and friendly for both beginners and experienced illustrators.
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Infinite Design/Free (Android: Free/$4.99)
The only nominee in our roundup that's Android-only, Infinite Design gives you the tools you need to doodle, make handwritten notes, and draw beautiful and intricate designs on your Android device's display with ease. Infinite Design features an infinitely zooming canvas, canvas rotation, and canvas-wide effects you can apply to your artwork, and multiple brushes and drawing tools you can use to make your ideas come to life. The app allows you to draw vector graphics, tweak them using multi-touch gestures, and saves your work as you draw. When you're finished, you can export your work to your gallery as JPGs, PNGs, or SVGs so you can work with them again later. The app is fast, and works just as well for quick sketches and doodles as it does for meticulous designs and drawings. If you like Infinite Design, Infinite Painter, from the same developer, is also worth a look.
Drawing Pad App For Ipad
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Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to vote for the all out winner.
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What's The Best Tablet Drawing App?
Honorable mention this week goes out to Sketch Club (iOS: $2.99), which many of you praised for its price and online gallery full of user-submitted artwork. Based on the nominations, it's clear there aren't too many popular drawing apps for Android devices and tablets yet (or at least none with enough momentum to earn your nominations), but we're hoping that changes soon.
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Have something to say about the nominees that we missed? Did your favorite not get enough nominations to be included? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it—it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at [email protected]!
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Photo by Marcus Kwan.
Mac has long been referred to as the “Creative’s workshop.” The idea that most graphic designers, interior designers, video animators, and architects are more drawn towards Mac may hold water to an extent. Mac attracts creatives for either of two reasons – as the traditional tool they’ve always used or its perceived high performance standards. Speaking of tradition, the first version of Photoshop was built exclusively for Macintosh users, giving Mac the first mover advantage.
And while the PC versus Mac might present an interesting discourse, I will be walking the safe lines, and a list of simple drawing apps for Mac is all we are talking about today.
Related: 5 of the Best Drawing Apps for Android
1. Patina
This sweet and simple drawing app is certainly closer to Microsoft Paint than Adobe Photoshop on the complexity scale, but lets you illustrate things that certainly wouldn’t have been readily doable on Paint. You won’t find any complexities like layers here, but within the one layer you do have you can do plenty.
You can use it for the basic things like cropping, rotating and making colour adjustments on images, but there are lots of other options here too when it comes to transparencies, brush types, sketching and so on.
The elegant interface makes Patina a delight to use, and it’s compatible with myriad file types like PDF and Photoshop files, alongside JPGs, PNGs and other usual suspects.
2. Markup Feature in Preview
Before going ahead and downloading a bunch of apps you’ve never heard of, you should try out macOS’s secret paint feature, hidden right there in the trusty Mac Preview app.
When you open an image in Preview, click the icon next to the search bar at the top-right to open the ‘Markup Toolbar,’ which you’ll quickly find does a whole lot more than just marking up.
This toolbar pretty much functions like a basic paint program, allowing you to draw, scribble, make shapes and annotate the image you’re previewing. There are even some mildly more advanced functions, like Smart Lasso, which lets you accurately pick out shapes in your image.
It’s simple stuff, but it does the job when it comes to everyday tasks.
3. Sketch![]()
This Mac drawing software holds all the aces when it comes to versatility. Sketch can be used to create professional artwork, draw and design websites and so much more. Sketch is a vector-based application with several features such as a toolbar, canvas, editable shapes and so much more. I have found Sketch a bit irregular, as it may require a little background knowledge and experience in basic designing. It’s nevertheless a user-friendly tool even for newbies. You can blob, warp, and twirl your way into anything.
4. Paintbrush
Paint Brush is a painting and illustrating application for Mac. Paint Brush is quite similar to Microsoft Paint on Windows in terms of functionality and build. Paint Brush offers some of the best freehand art experience in the game. It does not come with the complexity or spec requirements of other third-party applications, but if you need to get a few illustrations made up for occasional doodling, this drawing application tool is all you need to save the day.
5. Made with Mischief
Made with Mischief is a unique, simple drawing app for Mac. This application is as easy and simple as you could ever imagine. After installation you are welcomed by a blank screen and can start drawing right away, creating the nostalgic experience of pen and paper.
Made with Mischief is neither vector-based nor pixel-based and works best on a desktop. Made with Mischief has other exciting features like allowing you to create and customize your set of brushes and pen tools. Made with Mischief is a pretty good application for beginners as it lets you draw without limiting your canvas size.
6. ArtBoard
ArtBoard is a simple Mac drawing application that enables you to create minimalist and elaborate artwork for professional and personal purposes. ArtBoard offers so much in tools, features, usability components and flexibility. You can use any of its numerous backgrounds and layouts.
ArtBoard lets you work in layers, enabling you to work on different aspects of your drawings simultaneously. One of the most remarkable features of ArtBoard is the option of drag and drop which allows you to incorporate images straight from import. Although its lack of distortion tools and shortcomings in image conversion between vector and raster is noticeable, ArtBoard remains a top drawing tool for Mac.
Conclusion
There are certainly many simple drawing apps for Mac out there – free and paid alike. I wrote this list based on a cursory focus on the applications’ imitation of real-life drawing experience, availability of tools, simplicity, flexibility, and interface. I will not have the final word on this and earnestly look forward to your suggestions. Which of these drawing applications do you use? Kindly share your thoughts below.
This article was first published in September 2017 and was updated in June 2019.
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