30 drawing apps in 30 days day 6 - Brushes (Redux)

As mentioned previously the first drawing app I bought on my old iPod touch was Brushes. There was quite a lot of hoohah at the time that such fantastic drawing could be accomplished on your phone, but I found it almost completely useless,even with a pogo stylus . The pogo stylus was at that time the ONLY stylus available, and it was a horrid little stick with a lump of crackly foam on the end.

Despite the hype I dont think many peopl actally produced anything with Brushes.

Anyway, as I'm working through the apps I have I gave it a second look, but this time, on an iPad air, with it's far larger retina screen... and you know what it's not that bad.

It does exactly whatit says in the name, and allows you to create brushes, and as long as you bear that in mind, and use it to paint, with a brush and don't try and draw its fine.

The brush settings are very comprehensive, and it all works quite nicely, there is a bit a gesture sensitivity if you try to do small close strokes, which it interprets as wanting to use the colour picker (the opposite of the problem with Autodesk mobile sketchbook X)

It has multiple layer support,can import and export to a folder ondropbox as jpg, png, native brushes format OR psd, which is useful.

It automatically records the drawing process and turns it into a video clip.

Anyway, today's challenge theme was 'moon' which can't be right... that's no moon...

30 drawing apps in 30 days day 5 - Mobile Sketchbook X from Autodesk

My first iOS device was an early iPod touch and I seem to remember downloading 'brushes' and failing to do anything of any precision on it due to the limitations of the device, the earlier iteration of iOS and my big fat fingers. I haven't bothered even trying to draw anything on a phone sized device since. So today I thought I'd try the mobile version of sketchbook,(and blog the results in the phone blogger app) it works predictably within the limitations of the tiny screen. 

It has 3 layers, which is nice, and the same puck to control brush size and opacity as it's iPad cousin.

The only slight fiddle is the need to relaunch the pick menu after each selection, so pick a brush, open it again to pick a colour or change size.

That said there is a really useful quick colour pick tool, a long press opens a crosshair and means you can switch back and forth quite nimbly. 

As with all touch devices sometimes the gesture recognition fails and instead of the crosshair you draw a line, and then have to open the picker to undo.

It would be worth trying this app with a stylus to get a bit of precision in the lines, but I think you'd have to be quite dedicated to not just use a real notepad and pen... Which of course you could photograph and bring into the app as a layer to be worked up into something fancier. 

The other big downside is that using the app does seem to hammer the battery of he phone, so it wouldn't do for a long day of sketching... I guess it might work better on one of the fatter bigger iPhone 6s? 

So why would you use a drawing app on your phone? 

How about if you were on the train to Yorkshire to see your dear old mum? (You'd use your iPad if you had any sense)

30 drawing apps in 30 days day 2 - Pro create

Procreate
For the challenge I'm going to work through the drawing apps I already have on my iPad first, and then start digging for new ones.
I've had  Pro Create for a while now, but never really done much with it...
Unlike Paper it does have a fill function- "colour drop" which requires a bit of getting used to.

Layers work well and allow some washes or air brush toning to be applied and tidied with an eraser, and there's also a neat record function which creates a neat HD time lapse video.
I've uploaded to our Relay server:

Anyway, here's the pic for today... a sausage...

Procreate app

My Twitter stream has been full of procreate hoopla the last few days so I thought is have a bash at using it.

It's ok, the colour fill takes a bit ofbgetting used to and the edge detection is a bit random, but compared to the tools I remember trying in the early days of iOS it's not bad at all. 

Will it be useful in creating finished artwork? 

No.

Will it be useful for quick sketches...?

Maybe.

The biggest issues are still down to the problems inherent in finger painting, bold strokes are fine, but precision is tricky.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/procreate-sketch-paint-create./id425073498?mt=8