Do you wish to add another tool to your creative arsenal? Got a perfectly fine iPad or Android tablet at your disposal? Just a phone? Can’t bother to spend money on a drawing app? Well, step right up! We’ve got something for everyone here.

There are a number of scenarios in which having a drawing app on your tablet or phone can be a life-saver. This article has been written with one goal in mind – finding you a digital art tool that you have by your side wherever you may be. While the iPad Pro is hands-down the best device that you can replace a dedicated drawing tablet like a Wacom or a Huion with, many people don’t have one and don’t want to buy a new tablet right away. But that shouldn’t stop you from realizing all that inspiration for visual art bubbling around in your head.

Having a robust drawing app at your disposal means that you can realize ideas even when you’re caught without a notebook and colors. Five years ago, 5.5 inch screen sizes could only be seen in ‘phablets’, but now you’d be lucky to find a smartphone under 5 inches – that’s a lot of touchscreen real estate that can be put to good use. So without further adieu, here’s a few of the best drawing apps that you need to try out.

THE HEAVYWEIGHTS
BEST DRAWING APPS FOR IPAD AND OTHER TABLETS

This category lists full featured illustration apps that are optimized for the iPad and the Apple Pencil. These are top of the line with all the features you can think of and more, including 100s of brush presets, along with customizable brushes, real time stroke stabilization, layer support with excellent blending modes, and support for popular styluses like the Apple Pencil, Pencil by 53 and those from Wacom.

Autodesk Sketchbook

Autodesk, known for their animation software MAYA and other modeling software, has created Sketchbook with product development and 3D art in mind. We love Sketchbook for making much of the core app functionality available to you even in the free version. While you can customize the 10 odd brushes in the free app, the paid pro version gives you over a 100 very useful brush presets.

The Pro subscription for Sketchbook costs roughly Rs.320 a month, and roughly Rs.2,000 a year. Autodesk keeps with its pro-education stance giving students a free subscription to the app and all its other software for 3 years. Sketchbook is available on the Android, iOS and desktops.

Procreate

Procreate is arguably the best iPad drawing app and has been so for a long while. It is highly optimized for use with the Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro, and offers a streamlined, distraction-free user interface. The app’s toolset is perfect for concept artists and digital painters. You could spend hours on the app finding creative ways to use its vast brush set, with 128 options to choose from and the ability of making your own custom brushes. The only drawback of Procreate is the lack of guides, shapes, and symmetric drawing.

Procreate limits you from using all of its brushes unless you’ve paid the 5$ for the full version. It is available only for the iPad.

THE BANTAMWEIGHTS
BEST FREE DRAWING APPS FOR SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS

Never understimate the underdog. An app or service doesn’t have to break the bank in order to be powerful. There are a number of drawing apps out there which may not be the prettiest, but sure give premium counterparts a run for their money with fleshed out feature sets. These apps come at the highly economic price of free and are available for all Android and iOS devices.

Artflow Studio

Artflow Studio is a solid, free mobile illustration app with a straightforward user experience. Artflow enables you to get all the details and subtleties down pat with stylus support for a wide range of devices and a highly customizable brush set. The highly used brush size and opacity sliders are always on screen to speed up your creative process. You can move and rotate the axis of symmetry for technical drawings. Artflow is available for Amazon tablets too.

Medibang Paint

Although Medibang is geared towards drawing comics and mangas, it has almost all of the functionality of the apps previously mentioned, and the ads in the free version are completely unobtrusive. On top of that, it has a very handy perspective tool you can use to draw landscapes and environmental objects. The UI might take some getting used to but that won’t stop you from creating amazing artwork on Medibang. There’s also a very active manga community if that’s something that floats your boat.HONORABLE MENTIONS

To finish off, these apps aren’t exactly the best choices for being your go to mobile illustration app, but are more of novelties. They give you a few tricks up your sleeve and allow you to play around with specialized aesthetic.

Tayasui sketches

Tayasui sketches is a manga and comic book sketching app with a minimalist interface that has all the essential tools you need to make beautiful, eastern style artwork. It features well developed brush and color tools that make your artwork appear too natural for an app. You have quite a few tools at your disposal that you won’t find on traditional illustration apps, such as a rotring, chinese ink, cutter, ruler and highly realistic blending of wet watercolors. Available on Android and iOS.

Artrage

The first thing you notice about Artrage is the unique user interface, which is designed to look like an easel – every color and tool is available to you on the bottom two sides of the screen. This departure from the norm is surprisingly intuitive and maximizes the screen space available to you. Artrage’s thing is making hyper-realistic oil and acrylic paintings, you can even tune how much paint and thinner is on your brush. The paint mixing and blending in Artrage is incredible, and so is how they react to the texture you select for your canvas. You can import pictures to trace or give them an oil effect with the knife tool. Artrage is available for Android and iOS.

With the allure of the new year, we’ve all got plenty of motivation to experiment with new things and grow. So go ahead and try these out! If you like an app that isn’t on the list and you think deserves to be on it, let us know in the comments.