The age of the digital sketchbook has arrived.
I've been wanting a true digital sketchbook ever since I first discovered you could (poorly) draw circles on the Newton. Almost two decades later, I got my wish: The iPad Pro and Apple Pencil are just about the nicest tools for digital sketching I've ever tried. (And I've tried a lot of styluses, computers, and Wacom tablets.)
Even if you've never had an art background, the iPad Pro and Pencil make it pretty easy to start sketching — and better, continue sketching. One of my first friends in comics told me that the only way you gained drawing skill was by doing it over and over and over and over again; the iPad Pro is a pretty great tool with which to do that. (And you don't have to spend continuous money on ink, pens, and sketchbooks!)
I've gotten quite a few requests from people on how to get started drawing with their iPad and Pencil, so this week, I'm doing a sketch series on the iPad Pro. We're going to talk Pencil technique, the best way to start learning to draw digitally, how to save and export your artwork and sketches, and how to use the iPad Pro as a drawing tablet with your Mac.
But first! Let's talk about the drawing apps want to check out.
The best sketching, illustration, and vector apps for the iPad Pro
If you want to use your iPad Pro to make some digital artwork, these are the best of the best.
For starting out: Notes
Apple's default Notes app is limited in both tools, canvas textures, and color picking, but it's a nice starter app for anyone looking to have a little fun with their Pencil without picking out a paid application. Notes's digital pencil tool is one of the best in any app, and the drawing lag is next-to-nothing. (Surprising no one, it helps to have your app, device, and accessory all designed to work together from the start by Apple.)
For all-purpose sketching: FiftyThree's Paper
Paper is my favorite sketching app on the iPad Pro: It's not a one-size-fits-all-projects program, but it's the first thing I use to draft out anything, whether I'm taking notes or doodling during a TV show. Paper has a wonderful assortment of tools for starting a pencil, ink, or watercolor sketch, and works beautifully when paired with the Apple Pencil. Better still, Paper can sort all these doodles in separate digital sketchbooks, and you can even share certain drawings to the public Paper feed, or to Adobe's Creative Cloud or OneNote. (You can also export Paper sketches to a Photoshop or Illustrator document on your Mac's desktop.)
For print-ready art: Procreate
While I love Paper for fleshing out ideas, Procreate is the master and commander of actually making those ideas reality. The app offers a truly ridiculous number of layers, customizable brushes, and templates; for specific projects, you can even create your own tools, as my pal Jessie Char is doing for her makeup blog:
None of the brushes on Procreate looked enough like lipstick, so I made my own pic.twitter.com/0VFPZzjnVg
— Jessie Char (@jessiechar) January 27, 2016
Procreate can export truly large images as PSD, JPG, PNG, or in the Procreate file format, where you can then send or share them with your friends, clients, or web pals.
For vector illustrations: Graphic
I'll be honest: Until Autodesk's Graphic showed up on the scene, I hadn't worked with vector illustration since the death of Macromedia FreeHand in the early 2000s. Illustrator makes me want to throw things at my computer, and since my art hobby was just that — a hobby — I left it well enough alone.
But Graphic makes vector art fun for me again, and it does so in a completely approachable way. You can draw vector lines directly with the Apple Pencil or place nodes by hand, or combine both. You can change fills, colors, and group vector pieces. All of the fun of drawing with vectors, none of the Illustrator stress. Graphic isn't perfect for professional work, but it's a pretty darn good start.
For animation: Animation Desk Cloud
Disclaimer: I am a terrible, terrible animator. But the animation folks I trust put Kdan's Animation Desk at the top of their list, and it's not hard to see why. Most of the other animation apps available on the App Store are too limited for budding artists — unless you want to make clip-art dance — and the few that do offer traditional animation tools have user interfaces that predate iOS 7, or aren't optimized for the iPad.
Kdan's Animation Desk Cloud is the company's iPad Pro successor to Animation Desk, and it strips the clunky skeuomorphic interface while keeping a bevy of tools for animating pros. Like Graphic, there's a huge opportunity for Kdan — or another company — to improve upon the app's foundation and add key tools, but if you want to animate something by hand on your iPad, this is the app to do it with.
Animation Desk Cloud - Free, with in-app purchases and subscriptions
For 3D modeling: uMake
Like animation, 3D modeling is not, shall we say, my forté. But if you want to build some 3D models on the iPad Pro, uMake has very quickly made a name for itself as one of the best programs on the App Store. It offers extensive tutorials on building custom 3D shapes or importing 2D images and making them into 3D models; while I haven't had time to study more than a few of them, they're incredibly detailed and helpful. If 3D modeling is a skill you'd like to learn, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better app for it on the iPad.
uMake - Free, in-app subscription
For coloring books: Pigment
When I was in high school, I had a pretty standard "keep myself from falling asleep in class" routine: I'd doodle vast webs of intercrossed dark lines, then slowly color them in. It was usually good for an hour of entertainment, and provided my brain just enough stimulation to remain awake while listening to lectures.
Pigment takes my high-school doodling to an extreme, offering thousands of pages of intricately-drawn shapes for you to color in — whether you're listening to a lecture, or just want something to do with your hands while watching TV. The app is free to download and view, but you'll need a monthly in-app subscription to actually sketch on the patterns.
Pigment - Free download, in-app subscription
For Mac companion work: Astropad
If you've drawn digitally before the iPad Pro, you've probably used a Wacom tablet at least once in your life: The tablet and pen let you draw naturally within apps like Photoshop, either by using a plastic tablet or drawing directly on the screen with the company's more expensive Cintiq line.
Astropad essentially lets you turn your iPad Pro and Pencil into a Wacom Cintiq — with or without wires. A wired connection to your Mac results in almost no lag, and a supremely comfortable sketching experience, but going wireless is also fantastic: I have a couch set up across from my iMac and standing desk, and with Astropad, I can sketch in Photoshop on my retina iMac from 4 feet away. If you want to use your iPad on-the-go but also integrate it into your desktop drawing workflow, Astropad is an incredible resource to have in your app library.
Your favorites?
What drawing apps do you think are fabulous? What aren't worth your time? Let us know in the comments.
Reader comments
Best drawing apps for Apple Pencil and iPad
I consider Sketch Club a worthy competitor to Procreate with nearly as many brush, canvas and layer options. I don't really use their social aspect to the app, but the free brushes created by the community make for a serious advantage.
If you're interested in trying Procreate, they do actually have a pretty active community that also creates and shares custom brushes in their forums.
I use both, and more.
Current favorites:
-SketchClub
-Procreate
-Concepts
-Inkpad
-Forge
-SketchBook
-Sketches
Hello !
Since you have used many apps on your ipad pro together with the pencil, is the shading function when you tilt the iPad pro pencil functional with those apps?
Thanks
I have been yearning for a large-scale iPad+Astropad setup since first trying the app on my Mini nearly a year ago (I wrote a review about it on my illustration blog: http://jackjohnbrown.com/post/112953350424/astropadreview). I cannot WAIT to upgrade my setup once I can scrape together the $$!
Looks like Astropad is back to $19.99 If it was on sale I must've missed it :/
Thanks for article! My lovely drawing app is FunPics, it's social drawing game, time-killer...) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/funpics-free-social-draw-game/id57044411...
What I'd be more interested in are apps that can teach me how to draw or how to improve my sketches. Any recommendations there?
Check previous link, in funpics game it's great to play with others
I'll have to take a look. Thanks.
An app won't help there. I recommend several things. Draw, draw, draw all the time and look at some books on the fundamentals which should teach you about the underlying shapes which make up all things. Once you understand how these shapes connect, it's easier to draw almost anything.
I'll throw another app in the ring, as an odd "outside" contender: OnShape. It's a good-to-fantastic new CAD suite built from the ground-up to work on mobile and in modern "evergreen" web browsers with WebGL. It's not the sort of app where full-bore Apple Pencil support (e.g. pressure, tilt, etc.) makes sense, but is one where Pencil's precision is wonderful. Big iPad Pro screen is also wonderful... The app is free, but does require an account. OnShape's free tier is quite ample for those who want to tinker, prototype things, build models for 3D printing, etc. There's a fair bit of documentation and online tutorial vids to get you started.
For those new to CAD, this is what's called a fully parametric CAD suite, one geared towards modeling working mechanisms. You can do a some surface-design work, but other CAD suites would often be used alongside this for exterior design styling. (e.g. think of the internal build of your awesome Hairdryer 2.0 kickstarter project vs. the curvy exterior molding.)
[Disclaimer: I have no affiliation, just elated to have a modern Mac/iOS compatible contender in a market of ancient, super-expensive Windows-only behemoths.]
Serenity, as a part of your new series on drawing with the Apple Pencil, I encourage you write an article on taking handwritten notes. I've been happy using GoodNotes on my iPad Pro, which was updated to improve support for the Apple Pencil, but I know that there are many good note-taking apps for the iPad and I would love to learn about your preferences.
Also, if you have any general tips for using an Apple Pencil to take handwritten notes, I'd love to hear about those as well. One general tip I have is to add a clip to an Apple Pencil so that you can more easily put it in a shirt pocket, and I posted about that here:
http://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2015/12/review-fisher-chrome-clip.html
-Jeff
Yeah, GoodNotes is definitely one of the better ones, Noteshelf is also quite impressive - the GUI hasn't been fully adjusted for the Pro, but they have added Pencil support, and they have some nice trickery to "improve" the handwriting. I also like its organization features a bit better. MS OneNote does work pretty well with the Pencil, too. Notability is a bit of a mix for now, Pencil does work fine, but the palm rejection is not working for me at all – it still allows to draw with the fingers while the Pencil is active, which somehow ruins it.
A friend of mine (no, really) asked for a recommendation of an app that you could take a line drawing (scanned or hand-drawn) and color it, where it kept you inside the lines. Similar to Pigment, but where you provided the art (and without the ongoing subscription requirement!)... Does anyone have a recommendation? My personal FB hive mind did not provide any pointers. Thanks!
Procreate can import picture from your photo library.
As long as the line is closed enough, the fill tool can colour inside the lines, like Photoshop's Paint Fill tool. The selection sensitivity is also adjustable on the fly.
Thank you. Thank you all for pointing out these apps. After years of waiting, I'm finally sold on an iPad. (Pro)
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Still learning to draw, but it's mostly anime style pictures and Procreate with its vast brushes for making painting feel quite overwhelming at times when compared to the simpler shading I required.
Been trying and enjoying Medibang. It's an adaptation of Windows/Mac drawing software so the interface is busy and less comfortable than Procreate or other drawing apps. It also have line stabilizing feature to make cleaner line, seems to be staple feature for comic drawing software in desktop.
BTW, which Pencil works better with Paper ? Apple's or their own ? :D
I only just found out about Medibang Paint. I find it odd that I have searched a LOT both in the App Store and online for iPad PAINT apps and it has never come up before until I got an adonit Pixel stylus and they showed it as supporting their stylus. It has some neat features!
Another POWERHOUSE paint app is Art Rage! It is truly a must try app if you haven't seen it yet!
Great article. I'm a comic artist and illustrator and here are my go-to apps:
Procreate - Best drawing app on iPad, hands down. Sketch Club has a lot of great features, but Procreate is the real pro powerhouse with larger canvas sizes, a better brush engine, and touch gestures for a quick and easy workflow. It also supports copy/paste from clipboard for easier workflow between apps. Aside from the Notes app, it works the best with Apple Pencil.
Pixelmator - As close as I've seen to Photoshop on iOS. Useful for final touches/filters and resizing to save out to web. Supports copy/paste from clipboard.
Graphic - Best vector graphics tool, and because it uses system fonts, you can use it with AnyFont to use custom fonts in your art. Supports copy/paste from clipboard.
I can't wait to see what developers will release in the next year or two, but the iPad Pro already has a pretty strong suite of pro-level art apps.
I really want to like Procreate more, but compared to the notes app, the response to the pencil is so slow. It really takes me out of the whole experience. Adobe Sketch works much faster, but has way less features. I really hope the developers of Procreate can fix that latency.
It's been four weeks now - did I miss the follow up?
I'd really love to read more about your take on drawing on the iPad Pro!
(I'm just getting back into digital sketching and it's a rough start)
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How can I gain access to the past issues by Serenity, she really has a nice way to present things, I'm an artist that has been forced to the iPad due to severe health issues. I have the 12.7 inch iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil. I'm having a hard time going from a real brush and mixing gobs of paint and what little I have seen of Serenity's news articles I feel more at ease. Thank you, Wayne Wright, Basin, WY
Apple notes on the iPad Pro does nothing with the pencil...just create notes with keyboard.
I'm using Apple Pencil with my iPad Pro and looking for an app for sketching and video-recording of my sketching process. I mean capturing all the drawing process, preferably in a time lapse mode. Could you point me in the right direction? Thank you.
Procreate in default mode does record your sketch/paint progress. Spend a couple of minutes with the manual, downloaded separately, especially looking at the Gestures section to get a feel for how things are done to save some frustration. It's an extremely powerful app that gets to be a lot of fun.
I have found Autodesk Sketchbook offers recording option after you purchase Pro add-on. Though Procreate description sounds very attractive either, with tons of it's features. Will try this also. Thank you for suggestion!