Adobe recently announced that Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw, two great free drawing apps available on the iPad, will be removed from the Apple App Store (and Google Play) on July 19th. Fortunately, the apps get a free replacement in Adobe frescothat combines the features of Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw in a single app – but there could be a better choice for you, and now is the perfect time to find out.
You don’t need to make any changes as existing users can continue to use Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw as long as the programs are installed on their devices by July 19, but the apps will have limited support until they are fully retired January 10, 2022.
However, Adobe Fresco is honestly a much better app than Photoshop Sketch or Illustrator Draw ever were. (Adobe also offers iPad versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, but they’re locked behind a Creative Cloud subscription and lack many of the features of the desktop versions.)
The best other drawing apps for iPad Pro artists
And if you don’t like Adobe’s iPad apps and want to change something, there are plenty of other great drawing programs out there for the iPad Pro – maybe too many. To help you find one that suits your artistic needs, we’ve put together a shortlist of the best drawing apps for iPad Pro artists of every level. There are free and paid apps on this list (although the former are affordable options, we promise), but each has its own unique set of features and capabilities – whether it’s precise vector graphics, bold lines, or digital painting.
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Procreate is a powerful app specially designed for iPad and Apple Pencil. The user interface is streamlined and easy to navigate, and it’s packed with professional features like custom brushes, layer blending modes, perspective grids, gradient maps, and more.
Procreate lacks some of the bells and whistles you’ll find in full-fledged desktop programs (I really wish it had Photoshop’s layer effects like “inner glow” and “outline”), and it’s one of the few apps on this list that isn’t available on other devices, but it’s linked to iCloud and Google Drive and supports PSD, PDF, PNG, TIFF, JPEG and its own .procreate file types, among others, so you can easily export Procreate images to other programs.
In fact, Procreate has been my favorite drawing and painting app for years – I use it more than any other app on this list, and it quickly replaced Photoshop when I discovered it a few years ago. It’s a paid app, but dropping $ 10 on a one-time purchase gives you lifetime access and all future feature updates, which is a much better deal than paying a monthly fee for a subscription-based app.
Sketchbook used to be a paid app, but Autodesk now offers the full version for free on the Apple App Store. It doesn’t quite have the same depth of functionality as Procreate or Clip Studio Pro, but it does include key features like custom brushes, layers, and gradient maps, and Sketchbook’s myriad perspective grids and drawing guides are great for creating engineering drawings and design work. It also converts pictures of hand-drawn sketches to pictures using your iPad’s camera. There are free Mac and Windows versions of Sketchbook available This is also useful for those who want to use a single program with a consistent user interface and functionality across multiple devices.
Clip Studio Paint is popular with comic and manga artists who work digitally. It has robust brush customization settings and comes with built-in comic book page layout templates, animation tools, and even a library of 3D reference models – a great addition for anyone learning anatomy (and no, using them isn’t “cheating”).
Clip Studio Paint is available on iPad, Android, and desktop and comes in two versions: Clip Studio Paint Pro for $ 50, which includes all of the above, and Clip Studio Pro EX for $ 219, the advanced manga and Offers animation functions. Fortunately there is a Three month free trial available for all platforms so you can try it out before you buy, and monthly usage plans if you don’t want to pay full price at once.
Affinity’s digital art apps on iPad are more like professional desktop programs than streamlined mobile apps.
Affinity Designer is a vector graphics program, making it a solid alternative to Adobe’s Illustrator apps. It includes popular vector graphics tools like curves and precise shape creation, and is a good match for the well-known pen and pencil tools from Adobe Illustrator. Affinity Photo, on the other hand, is more similar to Photoshop and focuses on digital painting and photo editing tools. Both programs are known for their smooth, fast performance on iPad (although their exact performance depends on your iPad model) and their support for Apple Pencil.
Both apps cost $ 50, making them two of the most expensive options on this list, but you only have to pay for them once – which is still better than paying for a monthly subscription to Adobe’s software. You can buy too Mac and Windows versions every app.
Our final highlighted selection is Linea Sketch, another completely free app. Compared to our other free selection, Sketchbook, Linea Sketch isn’t as sturdy, but its simplicity is part of its appeal.
Linea Sketch is a straightforward drawing and painting app that, unlike many of the cross-platform apps mentioned above, is designed specifically for the iPad and Apple Pencil. It’s a great beginner program too, thanks to its helpful color picking tips that offer a choice of complementary colors.
Other standard digital graphics features like line support, transform tools, perspective grids, built-in page layouts, and multi-layer support are also included (although I should note that the app only has five layers per drawing). If you want to edit your Linea Sketch drawings in other programs, you can export them as PSD, PNG or JPEG.
And much more
As I said earlier, this list only covers a fraction of the really useful drawing apps available on the iPad. I’ve mainly focused on apps that I use (or have used), so it’s likely missing some that other digital creators swear by. If your favorite isn’t on the list, leave a suggestion in the comments. If they turn out to be hugely popular, I’ll add them to the list in a future update.
[Channel News]
