App Smart: Painting With a Stylus, Despite What Steve Jobs Said

But some apps work better with a stylus, particularly painting apps.

SketchBook Pro, a $5 app for iPad and Android, takes the prize for this category. It’s a comprehensive sketching and painting program from Autodesk, a company with decades of expertise making design software. This powerful app comes with a variety of painting and drawing tools that you can use to create sophisticated works.

If you’re no painting expert, the app is still simple and entertaining to use. It has many different controls for painting effects — pen and brush shapes, sizes, stroke pattern and so on — but the menu system makes it a breeze to navigate. You never get lost. And while you can use this app with your bare finger, if you use a stylus it’ll feel almost as if you’re drawing in real life, not digitally on a screen.

SketchBook Pro also has a few extras, like the ability to time-lapse record your painting in progress, that could be used by teachers to show how an expert would create a particular image. The app is impressive all around.

Brushes 3 is an art app that is definitely more about painting than sketching, given the wide variety of brush effects, including a simulated airbrush and one akin to painting with oils on a heavy canvas.

The interface on Brushes 3 is straightforward, but not overly basic. All sorts of settings let you control how the paint is applied to your image, but these are buried beneath a much simpler set of controls that make it easy to change brush effects and color — the chief things you use when painting. The app is free on iOS.

For a similar painting experience on Android, Line Brush is worth a try. It also has a simple and appealing interface that conceals some powerful painting effects, and though it is a bit more basic than Brushes, it’s worth a look. The app is free.

Android device owners should also check out Infinite Painter, a much more complex app than Line Brush. Like Brushes 3 and SketchBook, Infinite Painter has a comprehensive settings section that lets you control all sorts of details about how you paint on the screen.

This app is set up to make it easy to use a stylus. User interface nuances, like the way you select the intensity of a color by tapping on the icon and then using a sort of sliding control, seem designed to make sure you keep the stylus in your hand and don’t use your fingers. A free version has a few limits compared with the $5 full version.

Zen Brush, on iOS, is also an app that has styluses in mind. It’s a particularly good companion for tablet styluses that have a brushlike extension, because the app is about making Japanese-style calligraphy and painting. In some ways it’s more basic than the other apps mentioned here because there are fewer settings; it is aimed at producing images with few colors that feel as if they’ve been painted in ink. You can change the background and ink colors, but the choices are from a limited list.

What this app does well is recreate the sensation of painting with a brush. It also has an elegant interface, and built-in sharing options so you can show off your artwork on Twitter. The app’s not for everyone, and you may find its choices limit the artwork you can produce, but it’s definitely worth its $3 price.

Lastly, Layers is an iOS app that’s about drawing and painting. This app’s emphasis is on creating layers of painted patterns that stack up on top of each other to produce your final image, but it’s otherwise similar to Sketchbook Pro. The app gives users great control over the brush effects, and its small icons are easier to press with the tip of a stylus than clumsy human fingers. One issue is the app’s price — at $5, it’s expensive. I also found that sometimes the curves you paint come out looking like a bunch of small straight sections rather than one smooth, flowing shape.

Try out these apps with your finger first, if you want — you may find that tempts you into buying a stylus so you can paint more realistically.

Quick Call

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