The Best Drawing Apps for Every Kind of iPad Artist
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Apple's iPad Pro and second-gen Apple Pencil are my favorite art tools. They've replaced all of my traditional art supplies. I curl up on the couch with my iPad to chill and watch Netflix almost every day. I use it more than I use my phone, by far, and that’s because of the Pencil. There's something uniquely intuitive about the pairing of the stylus and tablet that makes me want to draw, sketch, paint, and take handwritten notes.
I'm not alone. The app ecosystem that has sprung up around the Apple Pencil and iPad is growing fast as professional graphic artists ditch Wacom and Windows for Apple and iPadOS. If you're an aspiring digital artist, or a seasoned pro looking to make the leap, here are the apps you should try.
Be sure to check out our many other buying guides, including the Best iPads, Best iPad Accessories, and Best Tablets.
Updated March 2022: We've added the Lake coloring app, NimbleGrip Pencil Grip, and a note about subscriptions versus purchases.
Best Overall
When you're getting started as a digital artist on iPadOS, you'll hear the name Procreate over and over. There's a good reason for that. Procreate is a fully-featured art-creation app that's chock-full of professional-grade features. You can import brushes or create your own, and edit everything from texture to flow dynamics and pressure curves. The interface is designed for the Apple Pencil, and it shows. It's an intuitive, purpose-built mobile art studio for professionals, not a desktop app shoehorned into iPadOS.
My favorite part of Procreate is the simple interface. It gets out of your way and lets you draw. Even if I’m going to finish an illustration in another application, I always start the sketch in Procreate. There’s something meditative about it—almost like it wants me to draw. It’s a great app, and the one I use more often than any other on this list.
For Traditionalists
Clip Studio Paint is an old standby—a favorite of illustrators and manga artists. No other app is quite as powerful and customizable. It's great for line work, inking, coloring, or anything else you could possibly need in a digital illustration studio. Because it was built for desktops, the learning curve is steeper than average. The interface is cluttered with lots of tiny buttons and popup menus that don't work as well on a tablet as they do on a PC.
These would be fatal flaws if Clip Studio Paint weren't so incredible as an art-creation tool. The brush dynamics are outstanding, producing some of the cleanest, smoothest, and most consistent lines I've ever seen. It's customizable for just about any kind of work or workflow, including vector art, and new users get a six-month free trial. Clip Studio Paint is $9 per month after the six-month free trial.
A Fresh Take
Adobe has been synonymous with professional graphic design and illustration for decades. Fresco is the latest software suite from the company, and it was built from the ground up with the iPad Pro in mind. If you’ve ever used Photoshop, the interface will be clear and familiar, but it's also a touch-first user interface, not one that was designed for a mouse. That design sensibility has made for a surprisingly robust and flexible application.
It came out in 2019, so it has several updates under its belt and it’s only getting better. The “live brushes,” which approximate the physics of real-world watercolor and oil painting, have become much more than a gimmick. You can control the spread and fluidity of watercolors, and even use the oil brushes to mix your own colors just like you would on a traditional palette. Adobe has also added new raster brush sets, for everything from sketching to inking and full-fledged illustration. Fresco is the most expensive app on this list, though. It’s $10 a month, but if you already use other Adobe products, it’s included in several bundles. Check! You might already have access to it.
For Coloring Enthusiasts
Sometimes you just want to color, and Lake is a great way to do that. Lake is a subscription app that provides you with line drawings done by a rotating cast of amazing illustrators and artists. The app has a wide array of brushes and colors, and there are dozens of categories to choose from. It's like a coloring book subscription service. Every time I open the app there's something new to check out, and that takes a lot of the pressure out of finding just the right illustration to color. It's a very relaxing experience. Lake is $9 per month after a one-week free trial.
For Notetakers
Note-taking is an art form too! For reals. Even if you're not doodling in the margins (you should be), sometimes you need an app custom-built for handwriting and drawing notes. I've tried every note-taking app there is, and Notability is the best. It organizes your notes by category, making it easy to manage complex notes (like journaling, brainstorming, or project planning), and the writing dynamics are smooth and fluid.
Writing on a sheet of glass can take some getting used to, as the Apple Pencil doesn't quite feel like a pen scratching across paper. But once you get the hang of it, you'll want to do it all the time. Notability turns your iPad into a never-ending pad of paper. We also have a roundup of more smart pens and note-taking tools here.
For Graphic Designers
Graphic design is a little different than illustrating and painting. It's not all about flowy lines or brush dynamics. Often, you need to work with vectors, which are scalable lines that can get as hi-res or lo-res as you want without losing detail. Vector art isn't always great for detailed illustrations, but it's the standard for graphic design, especially logo design. Picta Graphic has a powerful vector engine with all the tools you need to make scalable artworks.
A Grip for Your Pencil
The second-gen Apple Pencil has a great overall design, but it can be a little slippery. If you have wrist problems, or if you find your hands getting sore after awhile, a thicker grip might help. By increasing the width of the pencil, you're actually reducing the strain on your hands. Grips like this one from Uppercase help you hold the pencil in a more relaxed way. These have been great for keeping my hands nice and limber at the end of a long day of drawing, plus they add a little splash of color to your stylus. You'll have to take it off the Pencil to charge the stylus (doesn't apply to the first-gen Apple Pencil).
For a Little Extra Texture
One of the most common complaints from digital artists working with the iPad is how difficult it is to get used to drawing on a sheet of glass. It feels more like ice-skating with your fingers than it does drawing on a sheet of paper. That’s why Paperlike has caught on among digital artists. It’s a textured plastic screen cover that gives you the feeling of drawing on paper.
I was skeptical when I first tried it, but now it’s difficult to go back. The film is a little harder to apply than a typical screen protector since it’s very thin plastic and not a sheet of glass. You need to clean your iPad’s screen thoroughly and apply the cover in as dust-free an environment as you can get, but once it’s on there, it’s [chef kiss emoji]. The plastic nib on the Apple Pencil still glides smoothly over the Paperlike cover, but there’s just enough resistance that it feels like sketching on nice cotton paper. It's available for various iPad models, even older ones.
