Putting Digital Pencil To Paper: How These Apps Can Supercharge Your Sketching
Being an adult is not nearly as fun as being a kid in a lot of ways.
Very rarely does someone just bring me orange slices in the middle of my exercise.
When my shirts end up the color of my bedsheets, I don’t have anyone to blame but myself.
And in meetings, I can’t doodle with as much freedom as I had in the back row of my US history classes, where I filled up the margins with all sorts of characters, scenes, and squiggles.
Though adulthood has brought along its own joys (I can bake and eat pie whenever I want without worrying about someone telling me I’d be ruining my appetite), doodling and drawing is something that hasn’t been as easy to replace.
While my home office is stocked with all of the Post-It Notes I could ever need to make a formidable animation, Zoom meetings just don’t have the same vibe to drone out to like junior high and high school classes.
(That, and the threat of getting fired is a bit more serious than having to stay after school for half an hour.)
In recognizing that I’m not alone in my latent desire to create art - 41 million adults are learning an art form informally, while 23 million are taking formal art classes - I wanted to put together a short list of applications that could fill my doodle-starved days.
3 Great Apps To Enhance Your Digital Doodling
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Procreate - Though an app as powerful as Procreate has enough features for professionals, its community page will provide you all the tips and tricks you need to level up. As your doodles grow into additional dimensions, you’ll have a tool that you can grow with, too.
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Adobe Fresco - Replacing the frequently talked about Adobe Sketch, the new Adobe Fresco is a similarly easy-to-use option that can be used on both tablets and phones. Thanks to its simple design, it has an easier learning curve than Procreate, ideal for beginners and doodlers.
- Inspire Pro - Another solid entry for those digital drawers, Inspire Pro is focused on drawing and painting. Easy navigation and plenty of blending options make this a great virtual playground for the ambitious sketcher.
Just like drawing in real life, digital drawing is more about actually starting. Once you get into a groove, you’ll figure out your likes and dislikes, and you’ll be able to make the best decision for your doodles.
What about you? Do you do any of your doodling on the digital page, or do you keep it strictly for the college-ruled notebooks?