10 creative iPad apps for aspiring artists
— -- Ever wonder how to use your iPad to expand your creative potential? Whether you're an amateur doodler or the next Picasso, there are a variety of phenomenal iPad apps out there to help you paint your masterpiece. We've separated the best from all the rest to compile a list of apps sure to help you unleash your inner Van Gogh (ear cutting not required).
1. SketchBook Pro
Price: $4.99
This is the holy grail of art apps. Autopad's SketchBook Pro offers professional-grade quality with an unbeatable brush library and lots of artistic choices for a good price. The streamlined interface makes it easy to imagine you're using a real sketchbook. While the interface is fairly complex, it comes with lots of in-app help so you can get the most out of the product's huge array of tools.
2. ArtStudio
Price: $2.99
Lucky Clan's ArtStudio isn't as extensive as SketchBook Pro, but for a beginner, it boasts a rich array of features, including fun filters and art lessons for the true novice. ArtStudio is one of the easiest apps to use and gives fledgling artists easy access to its features — simply shaking the iPad prompts the menu to pop up! The easy-to-understand interface puts it near the top of our list.
3. Inspire Pro
Price: $7.99
Inspire Pro is fairly bare-bones for an art app, but it handles basic painting, drawing, and sketching extremely well. It boasts a robust color selection and focuses on giving you the most realistic experience possible. The realistic paint feature loads up the brush of your choice with color, which slowly runs out with each brushstroke, just like real paint.
4. Artist's Touch
Price: $4.99
Artist's Touch can work as a blank canvas, but it also allows you to paint over photos, creating a unique version of a beloved image. Artist's Touch is fantastic for absolute beginners and aspiring artists who want to practice on something with a bit more structure, since painting over photos gives novices the opportunity to outline preexisting images instead of starting completely from scratch.
5. iDraw
Price: $8.99
Indeeo's iDraw is the most expensive app on our list, but it boats the most extensive vector-based illustration capabilities out there. Even though some of its vaunted features such as its bezier pen tool might be a bit unnecessary for a beginning artist, graphic designers and professionals swear by it. Anyone aspiring to take their digital artwork to the next level may want to consider adding this app to their repertoire.
6. Penultimate
Price: 99 cents
This digital handwriting app, just purchased by Evernote, is the fourth best-selling iPad app of all time, and with good reason. The app lets you write or doodle with fingers or a stylus, changing the pen and paper types to create unique, fully digital handwritten notes and drawings. Penultimate already integrates with Evernote, letting you add multimedia like photos to handwritten opuses.
7. Layers Pro
Price: $5.99
You can test the waters with Layers by trying the free standard edition first, but only Layers Pro makes the cut into the upper echelon of art apps. The color picker lets you save the shades you use the most, helpful for painters fond of a particular hue. The app is great at thoroughly saving your user history. It loses a few points because users complain about glitches in a recent edition, but the company recently released an update to make sure everything runs smoothly.
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