Art with the iPad

As many well know by the now, the iPad has opened up a wealth of possibilities for artist, writers, and photographers. With my recent acquisition of the iPad 3, I wanted to explore my options of art on the go. Here’s a quick insight into my initial experiences with creating art work with the iPad.

First off, I headed to the AppStore to search at random for any art apps that apple suggested. I played with several of the free sketching apps, but found them rather limiting, slow, and just not worth the time for a professional artist. AutoCad does offer a free version of Sketchbook Pro called Sketchbook Express. I played with Sketchbook Express and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of features included in the free version. I created a very nice piece in it, but by some fluke, it erased everything that I had worked on. Dismayed, I wanted to look at the other options out there. A quick search on google lead to a list of all the serious art apps available. It was a toss up between Sketchbook Pro and another app called ArtRage. I decided to go with ArtRage.

I’ll admit that I was a skeptic at first, but by the time I closed the the app, I was convinced the iPad is the way of the future for artist. There’s no learning curve here, you just load the app and start painting. ArtRage offers a wide selection of tools to play with, all with fairly realistic results. My favorite method is to lay down colors with the paint tube and smear it into my desired shapes with the palette knife. If the colors are close enough, they blend nicely together. What I enjoyed most was not getting paint all over my clothes for once.

What I did find I missed was a tool for precision control. Fingers just don’t cut it drawing strait lines for some reason. I suppose some way, the iPad may reduce artist to a more primitive state. Now I know why cave painters had the shapes they did, it was really the only way. Luckily some genius people have already thought of this, and have made solutions for the digital artist. I searched Amazon and eBay for tablet pen. While I didn’t purchase it, Wacom makes a pen specifically for the iPad called the Bamboo. I went with a little pen made by Giffen since it was $8, but Wacom seems the way to go if you have the spare $30. Within an hour, I had already worn the Giffen pen out on one side! While a pen definitely made art more enjoyable on the iPad, it’s worth forking out a little extra money to get one that’s going to last you. It’s also worth noting that I have a screen protector on my iPad, which may cause extra wear on tablet pens made of certain materials. Be sure to do some checking around before you make your purchase.

I found creating art on the iPad incredibly enjoyable no matter what tool or program you use. The art works you see in this blog were all created with ArtRage. In the future, I plan on delving into vector based programs to help get my logo design skills up on the go.