Besides taking interesting pictures with your phone, creating art usually falls outside the mobile phone area. But fortunately, if you want to get education and knowledge, phones and more specifically, apps can be a rich source of information. If you’re interested in drawing or sketching, although your phone isn’t the best tool to create art, it can be to learn.
Thus, we decided to check a couple of apps that help aspiring and creative people to learn so they can gather experience and improve their skills. We did a deep dive into app stores to find the best apps and test them. Although we did find a couple of them, it wasn’t until we stumbled upon an online list of supposedly the best drawing apps that our research was made easier. If you want to check more resources besides the three apps we think are the best, we’ll share the link.
Best 10 Drawing Apps
Now, let’s continue with our top 3 picks.
How to Draw – Easy Lessons for Beginners
If you’re a complete beginner and you have the passion to draw but have no idea where to start, this is the app for you. The app offers step-by-step lessons that are neatly organized in a small app and besides lessons, it also allows you to draw different art styles. Mind you, you won’t become the next Picasso over the night, but after a couple of weeks, you’ll likely notice your drawing skills improving. The best part is how simple the app is designed by the developers allowing anyone to jump right in and actually learn a practical skill using nothing but their mobile phone (and a pen of course).
The slight problem with this app is that it can be saturated with ads. We don’t mind ads, but when you’re trying to focus to master how to draw, it can seem abrupt when an ad pops up. Besides that, the free version of the app is a bit limited but it will provide hours of education and mastering. After, you can always decide if you’ll pay for extra lessons or not depending on if you like what the app is offering.
ArtFlow – For Advanced Digital Artists
If you feel you have the necessary skills to take the next step, ArtFlow can be a great choice. We found there to be much more freedom with this app since it has many brush options and other tools. Of course, that comes at the cost of you knowing what you’re doing. We definitely recommend using this app on a tablet, rather than on a phone since it will be much easier to express your creativity. The paint engine this app is running seems to be pretty strong so unless you’re drawing exceptionally complicated drawings, you are free to do whatever you wish.
The downside is this app seems to only be available for Android phones. This is unfortunate because it is a polished drawing app that both professionals and amateurs can find useful. So if you’re an Android user and you have a decent tablet to support the app, we definitely recommend ArtFlow for your creative ventures.
ibis Paint X – For Pros
This app collected multiple app rewards over the years and if you try it out it will be clear why. This one is the real deal and no matter if you’re a professional illustrator or an up-and-coming artist, you’ll find this one useful. One of the most useful features we used is the extremely strong zoom that allows you to pinpoint small mistakes and easily edit. The zoom rarely pixelates and keeps it clean almost every time. There practically aren’t limitations to what you can do but it does require even more skills than the previous one. Naturally, it might be a bit overwhelming for complete beginners as there aren’t tutorials.
As said, we wouldn’t recommend this app to someone who’s just starting with digital drawing and sketching. Imagine if someone threw Photoshop at you with all of its many tools and it was expected that you create a marketing-ready image. That doesn’t mean you can’t try but keep in mind you might hit a wall here and there. Nevertheless, if you don’t give up, the learning process can be rewarding.
Conclusion
These are our top 3 drawing apps ranging from apps for complete beginners to seasoned pros. If you’re looking for something else, you can check the list we shared, but we think anyone who’s remotely interested in the art of drawing will find at least one of the apps helpful.
Finally, if you’re struggling, remember the most important thing is not having the most powerful tool but not giving up. If you keep that mindset then every obstacle will seem small. These apps are only here to make the road a bit less bumpy for you. We wish you all the best and let us know your experience with the used apps.