Whether you are a professional or amateur artist or don’t know how to draw anything at all but want to learn, iPad combined with Apple Pencil is one of the best ways to create digital art. The combination is regarded as good as real sketchbook and pencil. The good thing about doing it on a digital platform is that you will never run out of art supplies.
Every tool you need to draw, scribble, paint is available in the apps that support creativity. In this article, we will take you through the best drawing apps you can use to hone your skills on your iPad.
Autodesk Sketchbook
Developer: Autodesk Inc | Size: 122.4 MB | Price: Free
The best thing about Autodesk Sketchbook is that it is completely free to use. Its UI is uncluttered so that you can focus on drawing. The snap and scan feature is a bonus as you can take a picture of paper drawing from your iPad’s camera and work on it digitally.
The app offers more than 190 customisable brushes alongwith tools to work on geometric forms like ellipse, ruler and more. This robust drawing app has intuitive gestures and shortcuts to various tools that come very handy.
Check out Autodesk Sketchbook here
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Adobe Illustrator Draw
Developer: Adobe Inc. | Size: 105.4 MB | Price: Free with in-app purchase for CC storage
Adobe Illustrator Draw allows you to draw vector art too. The app has impressive features like up tp 64x zoom to use brushes as minutely as possible, Touch Slide ruler to make perfectly fine lines, and allows adding images from different sources like Creative Cloud. It also offers loads of shape stencils like circles, polygon, speech bubbles for creating comics.Â
Check out Adobe Illustrator Draw here
Affinity Designer
Developer: Serif (Europe) Ltd | Size: 1.6 GB | Price: $9.99
Affinity Designer is an app that utilises Apple Pencil and iPad to the best of its abilities. It is designed to take advantage of the machines, zooming in and out at 120 fps is smooth as a feather.
The app works flawlessly with the Apple Pencil’s pressure, tilt, angle abilities, making it an absolute delight to create vector art. It is regarded as one of the best apps to create vector graphics for marketing, UI, websites, design and concept art materials.
Check out Affinity Designer here
Also read: How to use Find My on your iPhone or iPad?
Paper
Developer: WeTransfer BV | Size: 134.6 MB | Price: Free with in-app purchases
Paper is an intuitive free app for your basic drawing, outlining and writing. You can also opt for a pro subscription to access more tools like collages, cut and fill, diagrams. The app lets you explore your creativity with cut, move, fix and add multiple photos to your journal sans complex layers, plus lets you personalise your sketch journals.
Procreate
Developer: Savage Interactive Pty Ltd | Size: 320.3 MB | Price: $9.99
Procreate is a powerful app for an artist to draw, sketch, illustrate with its exclusive tools like dual-texture brushes and smudging tool. If you do not find a tool you require, you can create your own in this app. It has a high-resolution canvas that can be printed in massive sizes without affecting the quality.Â
Also read: Â Top 7 apps to learn Piano on iPhone and iPad
Adobe Photoshop Sketch
Developer: Adobe Inc | Size: 169.9 MB | Price: Free with in-app purchase
If you are looking to do traditional drawing, sketching and painting, Adobe Photoshop Sketch is the right app for you. The app is a part of Adobe Photoshop that offers dozens of tools like graphite pencil, markers, ink pen.
It has 24 built-in customisable brushes, and you can also import brushes from Photoshop. The app allows you to mix photos in your drawing layer and has stencils to make perfect shapes and curves.
Check out Adobe Photoshop Sketch here
Sketch Club
Developer: Jim Scott | Size: 38.6 MB | Price: $2.99
Being on the lesser expensive side, Sketch Club is quite affordable for the tools they offer to create art. Its core features are blurring, filling, smudging, procedurals, selection, text, and vector tools. The automatic aspect ratio snipping lets you create shapes easily.
Additionally, Sketch Club has a community of artists to share and get inspired to draw. They have weekly competitions, daily challenges, and monthly events to keep you up to date. Sketch Club offers tutorials to hone your skills and allows users to live stream or chat for feedback.
