30 drawing apps in 30 days day 1 paper

I was talking to one of the lecturers in the School of Art about digital drawing apps, and remembered that five long years ago I looked at 30 different drawing apps for iphone and ipad: http://www.strangebiros.co.uk/2015/06/30-drawing-apps-in-30-days-day-1-paper.html

Today as I start working from home I thought it might be useful to revisit the apps, see if they have survived, improved or if there are even better options.

Back then I had an ipad air and probably a foam tipped stylus.. to be honest I can't remember.
Today I've got a nice ipad pro and an apple pencil.

After the investigations into ipad apps last time I switched to using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro as my main drawing application, as I found it was very well matched to my drawing style. Maybe I'll find another app to replace it?

So Back in June of 2015 I started my 30 apps with 'paper' by '53'.
It's now Called 'Paper' by 'We Transfer', the app looks familiar even though I've not used it in 5 years. I offers a collection of sketchbooks which you can flick through and add pages. There's a free version, and an £8.99 pro version that unlocks special features, no idea what they are though... The comments seem mostly positive except for the moaning about it being a subscription service.

It's actively maintained though, and the last update was 3 weeks ago. The app works well with my ipad and pencil, and the brushes and pens have a pleasant arty feel.

The palette is intuitive and the pen tracks accurately. There's no glitching, and the non standard zoom feature which used to be a magnifying glass according to my last review has been replaced with pinch and zoom. Apparently the old version used to have some weird finger twist to undo too, but that's all been changed and is now a very obvious undo arrow.

It's nice, I like the ability to add images to the covers of the virtual notebooks, and I can see it becoming a well used virtual journal style app if you like that sort of thing...  definitely worth taking for a test drive.

30 drawing apps in 30 days- day 15 Penultimate for Evernote

Penultimate is more of a note taking app than a true drawing app.
It doesn't have layers, but can import an image, which you can scribble on (note scribble).
It has a single pen with nib sizes in 01, 02, 05, 07, and 09, and a range of bold colours.
It has a chisel point highlighter in 02, 04 and 06 - though these numbers are pretty random as far as I can tell, as the highlighter is always far wider. The ink applied with the highlighter is transparent, and building layers and overlaps, even in the same stroke, multiplies the colour intensity.
The Chisel tip seems to angle itself pretty randomly too, though I guess it may take some data from the Jot active stylus it is designed for use with... I don't have a jot stylus.
Zoom function is pretty mad, it is initiated by the familiar two finger pinch, and opens a zoom pane.

The pane indicates which part of the image it is zoomed on, and can be resized a bit.
It works, but seems a bit weird compared to all the other zoom tools I've tried.

The eraser is a single size tip, but seems to take it's cue from the line it is erasing, so highlighter gets removed in sections from the path of the highlighted area... which leads to mixed results.
There is a cut tool which again seems to be a little inconsistent in which bits it includes within it's lasso of truth.

Exports to Evernote as a note, and can send a .pdf to Dropbox, but no real image export.
Overall seems pretty meh when compared to similar tools like Notability, but I guess if you just need to annotate a picture or somesuch it has the bonus of being integrated with Evernote.

Today's picture challenge, was to draw a chair:

30 drawing apps in 30 days day 10 Notability

Notability is definately more of a note taking app than true drawing app... but it's really quite similar to Paper by 53 and the other notebook style apps.

Very limited set of tools, a pen with a number of fixed width nibs, a highlighter that works in the same colour multiplying way with successive layers as many of the brush tools elsewhere.

The eraser is a bit of a beast in that it deletes the whole "thing" that you tap... I'm guessing each thing is a vector object, and instead of altering it just removes it. There is a clipboard tool which allows an arae to be selected using a lasso tool.

You can zoom in to add some detail, but there are no layers.

Export is not in image format rather as pdf, although you can send a sort of screen shot to twitter.

On the plus side it is super intuitive and you get to grips with it in about 2 minutes, I've used it to capture notes on my course, when we were doing concept diagrams.

Anyway, sketch for the day is draw a network... 

30 drawing apps in 30 days day 9 Adobe Illustrator Draw

Adobe Illustrator Draw is a polished app, part of the creative cloud offering.

It has layers, it zooms, and it has the useful template tool for outlining. The pens size and opacity are set using a drag left or right, and up and down.

...and that's about it simple and accurate.

The undo is a two fingered left swipe which seems to work without issue. The positioning of the shape tool is one of the only tricky things, especially when you try to position the shape template near the edge of the page.

Export to illustrator and photoshop, save to the photo library, or all manner of other places... and because it's linked to creative cloud there seems to be 2Gb of online storage available, and the ablity to share your work with a community using the Adobe Behance portfolio tool. I'vve shared my pic and will follow up on the community and Behance tool some time later.

Sketch today was draw a school... so it's a school of fish.

30 drawing apps in 30 days day 8 Adobe Illustrator Line

This app is by far the most professional and considered of all I've used so far, as one might expect from Adobe who have been doing this sort of thing for a while now. This app comes as part of bewwildering panoply of apps under the creative cloud banner, and looks like its been designed for the graphics pro on the move... offering an alternative to coughing for a wacom companion tablet, or one of the increasingly attractive Windows touch surface touch things, or whatever they're called.

The Adobe Creative Cloud for mobile approach seems to be to divide the functionality into individual apps, so there's an app that just builds brushes, there's this version of illustrator for folk who want some perspectives, supported by a wealth of grids, and viewing tools, and the neat template/ruler thing, which allows you to pick shapes to use as pen guides.

The app is designed to be used with the adobe stylus (and slide guide) which I think is there as a palm rest? further esearch required.

Zoom works reasonably well, though as per usual sometimes it thinks you are trying to draw a line, leading to additional undoing...the two finger left swipe to undo does work well, and didn't miss a beat.

The lack of fill tool is a bit of a pain, as is the lack of layers... there's a sort of layer thing, but it is really there to allow photos to be used for tracing, it has a level of opacity, but doesn't allow say a background tone to be layed down with a marker, and then have something drawn over the top... unless to draw your background elsewhere.

It could well be that the workflow is to do some tasks in the sister app "Adobe Illustrator Draw".. I'll try that tomorrow.

Sketch challenge for the day was  draw a computer...

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 1 - Paper by 53

At yesterday's team call Katie was enthusing about Chris Riddell, local illustrator, who has been encouraging everyone to draw.
We decided as a team to set up a sketch a day challenge, so I found a bunch of random words, and scheduled 30 tweets in tweetdeck to deliver a random theme suggestion each day at about 7.45 am when folk are on the way in to work, maybe bored on the train.

Once I'd set it up I realised it might be a useful way of researching the wealth of drawing apps, and styli available now, and produce some results that would be of interest to my colleagues at City Campus. So this is the first post in a daily series, where I'm going to try out a different drawing app each day, and share the results.
First effort was in Paper, by 53 .

Paper is really a journalling app,  and as such organises sketches neatly into little fake moleskine notebooks, which is quite handy. The ability to share individual pictures is useful - especially when used to share content to social media. I've also used the "presentation mode" before- which was a refreshing alternative to powerpoint.
The original version came with some basic tools, and additional brushes and pens were available by in app purchase, though their business model seems to have changed slightly and they  recently made a number of these feature freely available. The Watercolour brush is rather pleasant, and the pen gives a good fluid line, and is reasonably easy to control.
The undo function is a bit odd, in that it is a sort of rewind which involves twisting two fingers in a circle.
As with many drawing apps I can't find a fill function- this must be a pain to code as it needs closed shapes - which aren't easiest to create when "finger painting", in fact the whole area is a subject of study up at the Computing school here at Brighton Uni.
The other weird control is the zoom, which gives an old fashioned magnifying glass over the selection... and is maybe not as good as the ability to zoom the entire page, although it does mean you don't lose context.
The challenge topic for day 1 was draw a cat... so here it is:

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

Argh me hearties, Paper, from 53

I finally paid for the additonal brush set in Paper... with the aim of  using the books as a quick way of sketching out the gameplay mechanics in "Ninja Dinosaurs vs Pirate Robots" ... I'm not sure it's going to work, but it may well be easier to manage than the sheaves of paper covered in scribbles and doodles...

iPads

Adam is home from Uni, so I thought I'd check out how the ibooks stuff looks on an iPad3 (which he has) compared to my lowly iPad2. can you tell which is which?

Monster#1

Monster#1, a photo by killercarrot on Flickr.

Someone pointed me at the link to 100 days of monsters http://www.youtube.com/user/StefanGBucher which reminded me of an interview with Mike Mignola where he said, he just wanted to draw monsters.
I've been trying to have a go at drawing a page of webcomic a week, for www.wychwolf.com with more or less success.
However watching this reminds me that what I really like doing... the stuff that makes me happy, is just drawing monsters... it has been for over 40 years now.
So I'm going to try. I have dallied with the ipad as a drawing tool, with little success, but I'm guessing it'll be ok for unpolished sketches...
I may post them here, or I may try some lightweight ipad based workflow... sending to picasa or somesuch...
The first attempt is a sketchbook pro doodle.. this has export to a range of services, but only Flickr fits the bill for this idea.
I had a little bother remembering my account details, and went in circles once or twice trying to use the Google login credentials, briefly toyed with using facebook account, but the list of permissions was way too long for sharing a pic.
The pic uploads to Flickr quite quickly, and has a share with blogger button... however I then had to nip into blogger to fiddle with links, and resize the pic, add tags etc...
SO an interesting project to learn how best to use the ipad arty tools,  get a view of best workflows for publishing,  and maybe get Dom doing a little drawing too.

ipad art fail

I tried to have a bash at using the ipad in the workflow for the webcomic... sadly it's not quite there.
I inked up the pencilled sketches as normal with real ink and scan in using photoshop...
to get it into the ipad in a form that sketchbook pro can recognise I need to import the artwork as a .png into iphoto, connect the ipad, sync the last iphoto import, and then add it as a layer.
The size of the image is limited to 2048x1536, which isn't too bad as it's close to A4 at 185dpi... I usually work on the original A4 scan in B/W at 600dpi, and reduce to 300dpi to colour, eventually dropping it right to 150dpi, or 72dpi for final output.

Multitouch to drag the image image and resize is quite easy to get used to, and the undo button is close to hand when the screen doesn't register two fingers, and runs a brush line through the work.
Brush control, via the puck, covers size and opacity, with a stab of the brush button needed to change colour, or the side palette. It's all eminently do-able, right up to the point I started trying to do some fills with the bucket tool.
It just wouldn't play ball.. at first I though it was the slightly hit and miss pogo stylus, which makes the whole process a bit like painting with a dried out board marker.
Whatever the issue, I just couldn't get the fill to work where I wanted, when I wanted. I will persevere, but think the benefits are probably in sketching, rather than the proper production cycle.