Rathores blog

Never Fear A Blank Page Again With These Inspiring Painting and Drawing Apps for iPad.

If playing around with Draw Something has sparked those creative impulses, and you're keen to try your hand at more artistic endeavours - then chances are you've been looking at some creative apps for your device. There's a great variety out there offering everything from doodling to pretty high-end digital illustration tools. Knowing which one is going to best express your interests is tough to call, but we've brought together some of the most popular apps to see just how expressive and accessible they are.

Can you graduate from drawing stick men and sunsets to some real works of art? We'll guide you through these apps and to find out which one is going to be best for you.

Available on many formats, but tested here on iPad, Autodesk's excellent apps are always intuitive to use and can deliver some fantastic results, Again, the level of detail you can achieve is impressive for working on a small screen.

Tools: A pencil, airbrush and two brushes of differing size are your core tools with this app. It's not a huge variety, but once you begin to have a tweak of the settings you'll find that these offer more than enough variety to get working.

Control: There are plenty of brush heads, pencil types and patterns to pick from within this app, offering lots of variety. Throw in some fine colour control, transparency and radius and it's all in your hands.

Sharing: A little limited on this front, but you can email images directly from the in-app gallery or export them in JPEG, PNG or PSD format tc your phone's memory. From here you have more options.

Ease: A wheel menu for brushes and a top bar for all your colours and assorted options makes navigation very simple. The mirror tool is a nice touch too, allowing you to create symmetrical images very quickly.

One of the strongest painting apps on the iPad, there's plenty of brush control in this app with lots of small tweaks available to create some really subtle work. Its zoom also enables detailed work on a small screen.

Tools: The menu bar for Brushes is simple and minimalistic. You have a brush, eyedropper tool, undo and redo icons and that's about it. Head into the brushes menu though and things open up a little.

Control: You can set the transparency, shape, size and colour of the brushes you use meaning you have a lot of options for how you lay things down. The 800 per cent zoom is also a very handy feature.

Sharing: Send your images direct from the app via email or add them to your photo stream. From there you have a few more sharing options open to you, but overall we think this is a weak area for Brushes.

Ease: There's no question that Brushes is a very simple app to get to grips with, but it has a lot more depth than might first seem apparent. You just need to look at the sample images to see what can be achieved with a little bit of practise.

Procreate bridges the gap between painting and digital art nicely. It also packs a mighty punch in the resolution stakes,

Tools: Sketching, inks, paint brushes, airbrushes, textures and abstract shapes are all put at your disposal with this app. Each tool has a number of preset variations for different final effects on the page.

Control: Each preset brush can be changed, down to the angles of the brush hairs, the shape, or the grain on the page. This applies to the abstract shapes too, meaning you get some wonderful results with time.

Sharing: Email, Twitter and iTunes are your main sharing options with this app, although you can also send your canvas to your Photos and then share it any way you would like.

Ease: While there are a lot of customisation options, all the key tweaks and variables are on the screen at all times making this a very simple app to start painting with.

Tools: Like a real art studio you have oil paints, watercolours, an airbrush, roller and much more. Everything mimics its real life counterpart to such a degree that you even get the texture of the paint on the canvas.

Control: Change the brush sizes, how loaded with paint they are and the pressure you want to apply to the canvas. Mixing up these terms can lead to some interesting results using real-world art techniques.

Sharing: Direct links to your Facebook, Dropbox or DeviantArt accounts makes sharing your paintings very easy to do. Alternatively you can email them to whoever you wish, or save them to your photostream.