As tablets have advanced, many artists are turning to the best Android tablets and the best Android phones as the tools of choice for creating digital artwork.
The key to that is a great app to express yourself. With so much on the store, how do you choose the right app?
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–This roundup will help you narrow down the choices by sharing some of the best drawing apps available for your Android device.
The criterion
Here are the important features and factors to consider when choosing a drawing app:
- A wide range of brushes and tools
- Ability to customize brushes or create your own
- Ability to work with multiple layers
- Layer blending modes such as multiply, overlay
- Touch gestures and keyboard shortcuts
- Built-in time-lapse recording is a plus
The price of an app will also often be a deciding factor, especially if you are a beginner and just starting out. Every app here is free, partially free, or gives you a decent trial period of the full version, so you can test each one out and find the one that works best for you.
In case you were wondering, these apps were tested on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite. It still presents itself as a competent tablet for digital art and offers excellent value for money.
With that in mind, let’s dive into apps.
Sketchbook
Originally developed by Autodesk, Sketchbook has become a popular choice for many. It has a clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate interface. If this is your favorite app on your computer, you’ll be right at home using it on your mobile device.
Pour:
- Great responsiveness to pressure
- A huge assortment of customizable brushes
- An easy-to-find accelerated capture feature
- A useful complementary color indicator
- Symmetry and perspective tools
- A reasonable maximum number of layers (10 layers for 6000x4500px canvases)
Versus :
- Limited touch gestures
- DPI (dots per inch) is fixed (usually at 72 DPI)
Prix : 100% free
Infinite Painter
If you are looking for something that offers a similar drawing experience and feature set to iPad painting powerhouse Procreate, then check out what Infinite Painter has to offer. It has a great selection of textured tools and brushes that mimic traditional media. So, for the painters among you, this is recommended as one of the best drawing apps for Android.
Pros:
- A wide range of brushes
- Advanced brush engine to customize and create brushes
- Color with gradient maps
- Lasso fill tool
- Touch gestures
- Accelerated Capture
- Brushes can interact realistically with added paper texture
- PSD support
- High resolution canvases
Versus :
- Lack of keyboard shortcuts (but not necessary for this application)
- No text tool
Prix : $10, but there is a 7-day free trial with full access.
Clip Studio Paint
Clip Studio Paint is packed with features and has quickly become a popular Adobe Photoshop alternative on PC. It has a fair price for such advanced software and is also a great option for comic book creators and animators.
On tablets, you’ll also get the full package. It’s versatile in the way it can be used with touch gestures, keyboard support, and a nifty companion mode for paired smartphones.
Prix : $1/month for the phone, $5/month for the tablet version or one free hour each day.
MediBang
MediBang is another popular free drawing app, especially for new comic artists. Like Clip Studio Paint, it has a large library of assets to check out. You can save your work to the cloud and access it later on your computer as well. The mobile version is a bit different from the desktop version. It’s better suited to smaller screens but still jam-packed with tools.
Prix : Free with ads. Starting at $3/month, you get additional features, increased cloud storage, and an ad-free experience.
Ibis Paint X
Ibis Paint, like MediBang, targets fans of manga and anime drawings. It’s a bit heavy on advertising, though. The tablet and phone versions are much the same, except the side toolbar is tucked away on top of the phone app.
Prix : Free with ads. $10 for ad removal add-on. $3/month for Prime membership, 20GB cloud storage, and additional tools.
Fell
Free, open-source, and feature-rich, Krita is a popular digital art app. Designed primarily for computers, it has been ported to Android, as is, in its entirety for tablet users. As such, it’s better suited to working with a keyboard attached, letting you activate and switch between tools with keyboard shortcuts rather than touch gestures. It works as you would expect from the desktop version and is also available for ChromeOS users.
Prix : 100% free.
ArtFlow
ArtFlow is another great app that doesn’t immediately bombard you with features in a busy interface. For this reason, it is worth recommending it to beginners and amateurs. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it lacks the tools that more advanced users will appreciate.
Prix : Free, $6 for Pro version.
Final Recommendations
While it might be nice to have one piece of software that can do it all, you might find that one app does some things better than another. It’s not uncommon for artists to integrate multiple apps into their workflow and bounce between them on a single project. So be sure to test out a few apps to see which ones best suit your needs and work best for the device you’re using.
Personal favourite: Infinite Painter
Infinite Painter offers the closest user experience to Procreate on the iPad and feels just as powerful. Its minimal interface makes it a great option for phones and tablets.
Best for tablets: Clip Studio Paint
Clip Studio Paint is packed with features and a busy interface, so it’s best suited for the larger screens of tablets and Chromebooks.
You’ll be comfortable using it as a finger and stylus app, but you can also connect a keyboard and use it like you would on a desktop computer.
Best for Phones: ArtFlow
ArtFlow’s interface is wonderfully minimal, giving you the option to completely hide all toolbars and have the full screen area to focus on your drawing. A double-click to undo the gesture is all that’s missing here.
Android for your creativity
Often when people ask to find a standalone device for digital art, the iPad with Procreate is recommended. There’s a good reason for that. Its neat and intuitive design makes it accessible to beginners while offering a ton of advanced features for more experienced users.
It’s not the only option, and we’re excited about what’s available for Android. Samsung’s S-series Galaxy tablets with the included S-Pen, in particular, have become serious contenders. Whether you’re a hobbyist or a professional, there are great apps available to help you produce high-quality work.
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