When he introduced the iPhone and iPad, Steve Jobs asserted the touchscreen devices didn’t need a stylus because humans come with 10 great touchscreen controllers sticking out of our palms: fingers.
SketchBook Pro
$5 for iPad and Android
SketchBook Pro 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 will 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.
Zen Brush
$3 on iOS
Zen Brush 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.
These sketching apps are pretty spectacular, with SketchBook Pro and the Zen Brush that uses the styluses approach. Then you also have the choice of Layers, which has painting included.