The Rope Stabiliser function on the vector brush tool made smooth curves easy. Alternatively I could manually adjust the Béziers with the Node tool after I had drawn the paths. First off were the Rope Stabiliser and Window Stabiliser options to smooth my lines as I was drawing them (users of the Dynamic Sketch plug in for Adobe Illustrator will be familiar with how the former of these works). I was able to adjust the smoothness of my strokes/curves in a number of ways. The pressure sensitivity was good – I’d say on a par with Procreate – and there’s a great depth of options to give you good control over everything for the most part.
I worked mainly with the Vector Brush tool to create the drawing itself, then the Pen tool to fill out blocks of colour, and I was generally impressed with how they performed. Crucially though, it doesn’t appear as though there are any limitations with regards to the size of your canvas or the number of layers you can have, as is the case with some other iPad apps. On creating a new document, I had the opportunity to choose from a wide range of new document presets spanning different media (web, device, print), as well as the opportunity to import from the cloud or local files, as you’d expect. The basic tools and options are pretty intuitive, especially if you’re familiar with Procreate. I’ve been doing a lot of woodcut style illustrations recently, and Procreate has been great for working in that style (albeit limited to raster output), so the first task I set myself was to create one in vector. Once I’d had a little play around, I started on my first piece of artwork.
#Inshort ipad app review full#
There are buttons for this, but they’re hidden by default – and there’s also a full History menu of up to 8,000 steps if you wanted to quickly go back to a specific point. Specifically, it took me a little while to realise that the gesture for undo was a simple tap with two fingers.
Overall, things were pretty self-explanatory at the basic level, but such is the depth to the functionality it felt like I’d need to experiment more andread up to fully understand what certain options and tools did. Pantone colour books are included within pre-loaded swatches there are a ton of official iOS 12 UI symbols, buttons, widgets under the Assets menu and extensive list of effect similar to what you’d find in Photoshop there’s a fully functioning Type menu the Transform menu also includes detailed alignment options… I could go on and on, but in short it’s a seriously powerful bit of kit for 20 quid/bucks.īefore starting work on anything or checking out any tutorials, I wanted to play around with some of the tools and their settings, to see how intuitive they were to use. So when I heard about Affinity Designer and it’s ability to work in raster and vector I was really keen to give it a go.Īt £19.99, Affinity Designer is double the price of Procreate (£9.99), but as soon as I opened the app it became clear that this was in an entirely different league to Procreate in terms of functionality the interface looks closer to that of Photoshop or Illustrator than what I was used to with Procreate – there is far, far more depth here.Ī quick look around the menus only added to the good first impressions. But Procreate has its limitations, not least with regards to the lack of vector support. I’ve been an avid user of Procreate on the iPad for almost a year now, and it’s completely changed the way I work it has sped up the sketching process dramatically and I’ve even used it to create entire raster pieces to a finished standard. Serif's Affinity Designer for the iPad wants to be Adobe Illustrator for your Apple tablet – and largely it succeeds, finds illustrator Tobias Hall.