The 6 Best Apps for Artists

 

Between phones, tablets, computers, and Apple TV, there is certainly no shortage of apps to download. And if you’re interested in the arts, you should know that there’s a lot more creativity out there beyond picking filters for your Instagram photos (no disrespect to Instagram, but it can’t fulfill every artistic need).

Whether you’re a professional artist, an aspiring art student, or just someone who enjoys the occasional doodle, you should check out these artistically charged apps today:

Procreate

No paint, no canvas, no problem. There are several gorgeous painting apps on the market, but there’s a reason that Procreate is one of the most popular and the winner of the Apple Design Award. This is a professional-level app that’s still easy to use no matter what your artistic background.

Procreate comes with 128 beautiful, pre-loaded brushes for you to sketch, paint, and create; any artwork you make can easily be shared to any Cloud storage or social media network. The program features 64-bit color and an advanced layering and smudging system, so your art can be as intricately detailed as you like.

To see videos of George Pratt Painting on Procreate follow this link.

Artsy

If you want to find and appreciate art just as much as you want to create it, this is the app for you. It’s been billed as the “Pandora of art,” “the art world in your pocket,” and boy does it deliver. Artsy gives you access to more than 300,000 high-resolution pieces of art, which you can collect and share with “playlists” of your favorite images. You can also virtually visit museums halfway around the world.

Artsy is an ideal app for finding new artists, too, since you can search by keyword for the kind of art you’d like to see. You’ll also be updated on the latest art shows and fairs, and you can receive alerts on your favorited artists’ newest work.

Loop

Animation on your phone? That’s right. Loop lets you create short, hand-drawn animations right on your phone, and then upload them directly to websites like Tumblr. You can’t create the next Pixar epic on this app, but it’s fantastic for original animated shorts or easily tracing video frames.

So you can take a video of your best friend snoring, animate them as a goblin, and email your masterpiece to everyone you know – all with a few swipes of your fingertips. Or create a freehand animation of your own devising and upload it to the Loop gallery. It’s available from the Itunes store, and it’s endless fun.

TypeDrawing

This is the cutest, easiest app you’ll ever find for creating amazing typography art. Type a sentence, then doodle an image with your finger, and the app puts them together into a new and unique typographic image, with the line art created out of your text.

TypeDrawing lets you draw freehand or import photos to draw directly on them, and it provides multiple beautiful fonts, as well as controls for text size and spacing. You don’t need a background in art or typography to create something that looks professional, and you can send your creations to your friends with the push of a button.

Tayasui Sketches

Need to be a little more subtle about drawing other people on public transportation? Well, Tayasui Sketches is the ultimate app for simple sketches. This free app imitates a real paper sketchpad, and lets you doodle with pen, pencil, watercolor—almost any tool you can think of.

You can use Tayasui for drawing or for jotting down notes, and you can import photos to scribble on if you so wish. The drawing tools behave just like a pen or pencil on paper, responding to pressure. It’s not an app for creating complex paintings, but if you’re looking for a simple digital sketch board, this is one of the best.

Glitché

Not every artist sketches or paints—photo and video editing or manipulation are artforms in their own right. Enter Glitché, named one of Apple’s best apps of 2015. This app can make anyone into a digital artist: it takes your existing images, and lets you modify and pixelate them into glitchy masterpieces.

Change any old selfie into a psychedelic, rainbow-colored work of art. Yes, technically it’s yet another photo filter app, but the filters are so unique, and your level of control over them so advanced, that it’s like no other photo-manipulation program out there. You can even use this app to edit videos and make GIFs. It’s the weird, pixelated playground you never knew you wanted.

There are so many different artistic styles out there, but everyone can find at least one app to get their creative juices flowing. These six are just a few of the best, but they’re a great place to start for artists of any kind!

 

This post was written by Charlotte Ahlin in partnership with Fueled. Charlotte Ahlin is a writer, actor, funny person and cartoonist. She’s a native New Yorker and a recent graduate of Oberlin College, with a degree in Creative Writing. Check out her website here.