3 Drawing Apps that Might Make You Ditch Your Sketchpad

I love to sketch. I have loved it since I was a kid. For a time, I forgot. Then several years ago I remembered. I started sketching again with A4 sketch pads. I tried a stack of them. Finally I found my sketch pad of choice at a local artists supply in Melbourne CBD.

Then I started using a tablet. I tried the iPad. I moved to a Samsung Tab. Then I tried the Samsung Note. Now I’m back onto the iPad.

During these transitions I’ve tried endlessly to find the perfect tablet sketching experience. Something that would be akin to drawing on paper, but with new interactions, like pinch and zoom, that are pure revelations when it comes to tablets. These are 3 drawing apps I’ve used and loved and recommend to you also. I like them so much that these days I find I spend far more time sketching on my tablet than I do on paper.

Notability

Notability is useful for all types of notes, not just sketching. It’s simple to categorise your notes, move pages about, and and even select and zoom/rotate objects. This is my ‘go to’ quick sketching app. If I’m in a meeting and want to note what’s being said in an illustration or mind map, I do it in notability. It’s my ‘main use’ app because it’s fast. It’s easy to sketch a quick object (whether a cloud or arrow). It’s even simpler to colour objects so that they have life on the page. Because objects are vectors, its a trivial task to select and resize an object also. And swiping up and down between pages lets me quickly find notes from months ago, just as easily as those from yesterday.

Paper

Paper is simply a beautiful app. For the artist in you that likes to sit in galleries and lose yourself in water colours, you’ll find this app as pleasant to spend time in as MOMA. A real weakness of Paper for some time was its poor zoom function. But this has since been solved in recent releases. Now you can pinch and zoom a magnifier to sketch in fine detail. I still have niggles with this app, but cannot fault it for sustaining a simple, elegant design, useful pen tools, and its sheer fun to use. What’s more, Paper includes a section that shows the art of other users, so you’re never far from inspiration.

Procreate

Procreate is a serious tool. It brings many elements previously reserved for Photoshop to the illustrator’s toolkit. You can use layers, opactity, colour swatches, about a million brushes and even create your own custom tools. This is the app to use if you wish to sketch contemplatively, with absolute realism, and high impact. It is not an app that you necessarily use for quick work-sketches. It is the app you use if you want to create artwork that you would put on the wall.

Of course there are many things your tablet cannot do. For example, it’s still difficult to get the feeling of your pen on paper, which provides a very tactile drawing experience. And it’s still difficult to get the pin point accuracy and graded shading of a good 2B pencil. But the gap has reduced considerably, at least enough for your tablet to now be a credible and frequently used option for day to day sketching needs. If you give it a go, I’d love to hear what you think.