SketchBook Pro 2.0: Art on the iPad, Done Even Better

By  |  Monday, May 9, 2011 at 12:28 am

The iPad is blessed with several excellent apps for drawing and painting using tools that mimic the look of real art supplies. Of the ones I’ve tried, my favorite is Autodesk’s SketchBook Pro–and it just got an extremely meaty upgrade to version 2.0.

The user interface is much improved over the original version that shipped the same day as the first iPad–for instance, you can pin toolbars to the sides of the screen. On the iPad 2, it supports a high-resolution 2048-by-1536 canvas. You can shuttle files back and forth using Dropbox. And while I haven’t tried this yet, Autodesk says the app is better at sharing images with the Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android versions of the program.

There’s also a SketchBook Store that lets you download and install additional drawing tools, such as fancy pencils. (So far, all its offerings are free.)

The iPad isn’t my dream digital art device, mostly because its technology doesn’t allow for anyone to build a pointy, pressure-sensitive stylus of the sort you can use with a Wacom tablet. Even so, once you get the hang of drawing with one of the blunt, non-pressure-sensitive styluses that are available–I like this one–it’s addictive. And SketchBook Pro, like many iPad apps, is a bizarrely good value–it’s $4.99, vs. $79.99 for the Windows/Mac desktop version. If you like to draw and have an iPad, you need this software.

 
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4 Comments For This Post

  1. Get Real Says:
    May 9th, 2011 at 2:50 am

    The iPad is "blessed" with…?

    I am waiting for the day for this hellish existence of being a newish tech Blogger and it never ceasing to amaze me how profoundly loyal Apple end users are to their benevolent Jobs. It's to the point you can never get a sense of trust when reading their reviews of technology because they are either undeniably ignorant to the vast majority of apps they review have long been available to android devices as well as old school winmo devices for years, and of numerous flavors, or they are willfully blind. Case in point about this blind allegiance: There is the absurdity of the plethora of posts from Apple heads after the tracking fiasco that outright LIE and MISLEAD by grouping Google in as an equal violator every single instance when they report on a development about Apple's tracking, saying "Google does it too" as if it's a bygone fact and so 'nothing to see here' (try it….try finding a blog that is talking abougthf Apple tracker and doing how many resist putting s line in the first paragraph of two and LIE about Google also tracking you the same way, or implying it) when there is a profound fundamental difference between Google CLEARLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY alerting you at set up if you would like your GPS location tracked, and allows you to say "yes" or "no", and MERELY because it has the option to enable the tracking marked "yes", despite that typing "no" OR BYPASSING IT will NOT TURN TRACKING ON, Apple heads still like to pretend that's the SAME THING as the iPhone AUTOMATICALLY WITHOUT ASKING YOU EXPLICITLY like Google set up, tracks your location and undoubtedly can AND HAS retrieved that data for police, and notified you in the lengthy Terms of Service, and somehow this is not dishonest to group the two method together as of they are the same violation. Unreal.

  2. Harry McCracken Says:
    May 9th, 2011 at 6:38 am

    My use of “blessed” was simply meant to to say “it has them, and I think that’s neat.” And I don’t think I ever said or implied that Android had the same tracking issue that the iOS devices have…

    –Harry

  3. touch screen gloves Says:
    May 25th, 2011 at 2:50 am

    i just like the pic,tks

  4. bob Says:
    October 19th, 2011 at 7:49 pm

    How do you draw a dot with this program?