If you’ve tried and failed to get back into drawing, try installing one of these apps on your phone or tablet. If you have a stylus, that’ll be perfect, but you can even get started with finger painting. The point is to get something out on the canvas. We spend so much time on our phones, and if the phone is the canvas, we’ll eventually fall back into the habit.
1
Concepts
I find the best way to get back into a habit is to remove distractions and friction as much as possible. Concepts gives you just that because it has an infinite canvas and a super intuitive interface.
On the first launch, you simply start a new drawing, tell the app if you’re left or right-handed so it can adapt the interface to it, and then choose your shortcut gestures. Then it drops you right into an infinite canvas, which you can move around on with two fingers. You can zoom in and zoom out with pinch gestures, too. It just frees up your mind to focus only on the drawing and not on setting up documents and fiddling with dimensions or other nitty-gritty details.
You’ll also notice the tool wheel, which I adore. You can spin it around to select your tools, change colors, or opacity, and such. It’s really satisfying to use this wheel because it’s so intuitive and fun.
And check out the copic marker selection. You can spin the wheel around to choose from hundreds of markers. It actually feels like opening a case of actual markers and picking one. I keep coming back to this app just for the copic marker selection.
You can undo by double-tapping anywhere on the screen, and there’s no limit to how many times you can undo. You can add similarly infinite layers on top of the canvas and work with those. Everything is autosaved, and you can return to a canvas just by tapping its thumbnail in the main menu.
Concepts is also great for taking notes and brainstorming so that you can keep your schoolwork right next to your doodles in this catch-all app. The base version is free and good enough for most people.
Tayasui Sketches
Tayasui Sketches is great for watercolor. It can kind of simulate the wet-into-wet, dry-into-dry, and dry-into-wet feeling, and even has a button for quickly drying the ink. The other brushes are nothing to note, even though there are pens and such for line work, but they all look and feel generic and identical to me.
If watercolor is your go-to medium, but you haven’t picked up a brush in a while, try downloading this app and just do some loose sketches. The app will drop you onto the canvas right away, and there’s a handy color swatch selection available to you. Tapping with two fingers undoes the last action, and the droplet icon quickly dries the ink. Easy-peasy.
2
Autodesk Sketchbook
Autodesk Sketchbook is perfect for pencil sketching, ink drawing, and pastels. It gives you an excellent selection of inking tools (markers, halftone textures, pens) and a variety of pencils (4H through 9B, watercolor pencils, textured pencils, and more).
I mostly sketch in pencil and the fine art pencil set in Sketchbook captures the feel of graphite, even though you can’t change the texture of the “paper” itself. You also get a bunch of paint brushes, pastels, and assorted smudging and texturing tools, but they tend to be hit or miss for me. The pencils are the best out of the set.
The color selection is enabled with a standard color wheel, the kind you’d find in Microsoft Paint. There’s a limited set of swatches you can choose for quick selections, but it’s not that intuitive.
Nothing beats the interface you get with Concepts. Speaking of which, the Sketchbook canvas is limited, and the app automatically drops you into it. Undo and redo work with two-finger gestures, but you have to enable them manually.
The base version of this app is free, which is plenty good to just nudge you back into drawing.
3
MediBang
MediBang takes a more maximalist approach to its interface. Starting from the canvas texture itself, you get a massive selection of textured fabric and paper to draw on. You can overlay the canvas with a variety of grids, and set the canvas to snap to that grid. There are even comic panel presets.
You can enable layers and set blending modes for them (just like in Photoshop). There is also a magic wand tool for selections, templates for manga and comic book drawings, and an in-built tool for creating timelapses of your drawing process.
Medibang also comes with a huge brush set, but most of them are locked behind a paywall. The base version is free, but it does have annoying ads. I suggest turning off the internet when drawing in Medibang, or the ads will make you want to quit the app.
Concepts is my first recommendation, but don’t let it keep you from exploring the other three apps or any others you can find. Some honorable mentions include Krita, Ibis Paint, and Pug Pad (for kids). There are so many sketching and illustration apps out there, you’re bound to find one that you like.
