The A-Z Comprehensive Guide to Drawing Apps

Adobe Illustrator Draw is a part of Adobe’s Creator applications and offers a variety of features like layers, 5 different pen tips with various customisation features and a zoom in up to x64 to work on details. You can change the opacity of the canvas background and add more shapes by installing third-party shape libraries. Adobe Illustrator Draw is free with in-app purchases available, that may cater to professionals. Professionals can easily create and manage projects and a project can have as many drawings as you want! You can import designs from Adobe Capture CC and ​export to different platforms, like Behance, copy your image to the Adobe Creator Cloud, or even export to your desktop for use on other Adobe products like Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, Capture CC and Photoshop ​Sketch.

With more GIFs supported in different social media platforms, more apps are available to generate animated GIFs of your drawing. There are features to add text to photos, change the text size, font and opacity before adding it to the image. ArtBoard also offers several brushes and 4 unique blending modes. The brushes are divided into two categories: basic and artistic and you can customise the size, strength, hardness and spacing. You can create up to 15 layers and have a colour mixer and palette tool and even the option to insert an image in the canvas. The best part is, apart from making GIFs, you can create a drawing and record it in the form of videos. It is a drawing and animation app in one!

Artecture is an excellent app for beginners because they offer users practical tools like pencil, marker pen, oil brush, oil blend brush and real oil brush. It allows users to learn the basics of drawing symmetries by having vertical, horizontal and concentric ruler guidelines. After you sketch, draw and paint, your creations can be extracted in formats like jpg, png and bmp.

ArtFlow is one of the in-depth drawing apps that has a smooth UI; perfect for beginners and professionals alike. When you start drawing, the app hides its navigation bars to make sure you have enough space to draw on the canvas. Features include up to 70 different brushes, smudge and other tools. They also have layers and a layer blending functionality, and offers up to 6 shape tools. You can flip the canvas horizontally or vertically and also frame the canvas!

With more time-lapse drawing tutorials popping out on social media, ArtFlow makes sure you can achieve this seamlessly as it can record a time-lapse video of your drawing. It can also export to jpeg, png, and PSD (to import to Photoshop later), but if you want a hard copy of your creation, it also has an inbuilt tool to print your photo.

ArtRage is perfect for those who want the impression of real textures and effects that you can get from real paint—it tracks how much paint you have applied and even how wet the paints are. You can smudge and smear with various tools and is perfect for users who want to indulge in watercolour or oil paints as their medium. There are unlimited layers and photoshop blending modes, which are very forgiving features for beginners and kids. There is also unlimited undo and redo and opacity controls.

Autodesk Sketchbook

Autodesk is one of the most popular apps out there, suitable for both beginners and professionals alike. The app can be used on both Android and iOS. Features include a variety of drawing tools and up to 10 customizable brushes, the ability to create and manage layers and a full-screen drawing mode. There are 6 blending modes and up to 2500% zoom to enable you to add minute details to your work. It also offers a simulated pressure sensitivity to make sure you can emulate real life strokes in your drawing.

There is an eraser, image cropper, pinch to zoom feature, blender utility, colour picker, ruler tool and a gallery organiser feature embedded as well. For vector images, users can easily insert a line, square or circle in a picture. When done, drawings can be shared on different social network platforms.

Our games and cartoon animations started off with pixel art but it is an art form long forgotten. A lot of newer games have been picking it up again recently too! (Think, Minecraft) Dotpict allows you to do pixel art by offering up a grid, and you can zoom in and create little scenes or people by filling up the pixel boxes. No need to worry about losing your work as it comes with an auto-saving feature, and an undo, redo and export function to secure your job when it’s done.

Fresco Paint Pro

This app offers 12 different brushes, up to 4 layers and 21 filters including blur and vignette. Your creations can also be exported to Photoshop. In our opinion, this is best suited for beginner drawers.

IbisPaint

IbisPaint has one of the most comprehensive features in a drawing app with 140 different brushes including dip pens, felt tip pens and actual paint brushes, where you can change the brush opacity, angle and thickness. It has layer support where you can have unlimited layers, can modify layer parameters and offers a palette tool that contains 30 colours. It also allows users to replace colour on the palette with one they use most frequently. How convenient is that? Several filters are in place, like the eraser, smudge, blur, ruler, blender, bucket fill, zoom and image stabiliser. You can also quickly change the orientation of the canvas. IbisPaint also caters explicitly to those who want to create specific types of drawings like mangas and animes.

Infinite Painter

Infinite Painter comes with more than 80 brushes and also the option to create your brush and brush settings! The brushes can emulate a realistic interaction with digital paper texture and create the impression that you are working on paper instead of a tablet. You can also create as many layers with their Photoshop blending modes, perspective guides selection masks and clipping masks. Adding details is also easy with their 2500% zoom feature. Its pro version includes more brush sets like a synthetic and smudge brush, more layers and gradient fill tools.

Learn How to Draw

The Learn How to Draw app, as its name suggests, offers a variety of tutorials for beginner to advanced drawers. Mainly focusing on comic book style drawing, there are new tutorials to follow almost every week. The advantage of using this app is that you can directly practice on the app itself, saving you the time of switching between apps if you were to follow a tutorial on YouTube.

MediBang Paint

One of the best features of MediBang paint is its cross-platform support and cloud saving feature. You can download this app from mobile, Mac or even Windows. You can also keep your work in one spot and move it to another platform, making your creation accessible anywhere at any time. They have a decent number of brush tools that are suitable for free drawing and comic drawing.

PaperOne

PaperOne’s edge is in its ability to emulate your creations to real life as closely as it can. There are different brush types with different opacity depending on the pen pressure sensitivity and this enables users to emulate actual life strokes and lines. There is also a tracing feature where you can import a picture and set it to the transparent mode and users can trace the original photograph. It helps beginners get a feel for face proportions or different drawing styles.

Rough Animator

This app allows you to create animations by drawing it frame by frame and string it together at the end to develop little cartoons. You can control the frame rate and resolution and finished projects can be exported as GIFs, a Quicktime video or as an image sequence. Most free messaging apps now support the sending of GIFs, so make your customised GIFs and share the fun with your friends!

Sketch

Sketch allows you to set a background colour for your canvas and offers 15 unique brushes that are customizable and stickers that you can impose on your images. You can create new paintings, add text to pictures and rotate the canvas. You can also glam up your previously taken pictures with sticker packs and crop them. Just like a photo editing app, you can also change the brightness and contrast of images. The app comes with a ruler tool and colour palette utility and redo and undo function. It also allows you to backup or sync your creations to multiple devices.