Do I need an Apple Pencil to use the best drawing apps for iPad?

You don't need an Apple pencil to use drawing apps on an iPad – see our pick of the best Apple Pencil alternatives for other options. However, we do rate the Apple Pencil as the best iPad stylus overall. It is more expensive than some other options, but we find it offers the best experience for drawing.

The best drawing apps for iPad

(Image credit: Pekic via Getty Images)

The best drawing apps for iPad can allow you to sketch and create digital art wherever you are and whenever inspiration strikes. The iPad's touchscreen is a fantastic canvas, and the experience is particularly good with the Apple Pencil 2 on an iPad Air or iPad Pro (see our guide to choosing the best iPad for drawing).

There are lots of great drawing apps for iPad available to help you get the most out of the device, but we've picked out our favourites based on our own hands-on tests and recommendations from the many artists who we have featured on the site. We've sought apps that work well, offer useful features and provide a smooth experience with either Apple Pencil 1 or 2. We've aimed to include the best drawing apps for iPad for people of different levels, from beginners to pros, and we've considered the pros and cons of each.

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Our testing asserted that Procreate's biggest selling point is its flexible and customisable interface. From the colour picker to the brush size, there are so many options to help improve your workflow. Plus, Procreate's colour library is like no other with its ability to create your own palettes, colour options and even colour recommendations. We love the new 3D painting features, which mean you can now create pretty much anything you like on the app. The downside is it's only available for iPad.

Just like Procreate, Adobe Illustrator is incredibly popular in the digital art community. While the app is free, it does require some in-app purchases, but with features like radial, grid and mirror repeat, its worth the money. The app takes the best features from the desktop app and pops it into this handy portable version of the app. And if you're still not convinced, you can read more about it in our full Illustrator for iPad review.

We've found that when you combine the Illustrator app with the new iPad Pro (M1, 2021) and the Apple Pencil 2, then you get a sleek, controlled and enhanced digital art experience (make sure you check out the iPad Pro deals and the Apple Pencil deals if you haven't got the devices already). Unfortunately, the app is only available on a subscription model and it's not compatible below iOS 14. But you can seamlessly transfer your work to and from your desktop app to your iPad app, which is a big positive.

We'd be pretty surprised if you hadn't heard of Photoshop by now (Creative Bloq is packed to the brim with Photoshop content). And now you can equip your iPad with a slimmed-down version of the desktop software. When we tested it, we found there are some important missing tools, but the functionality is being improved all the time and it's becoming a useful add-on that allows you to seamlessly transfer files between the app and the desktop – and it can take a heavy load.

With the likes of the highly-anticipated Live Brushes that adapt to a variety of drawing styles (though we did feel they were a touch limited), Fresco gives users a sleek and smooth drawing experience. Fresco may not have text or animation options, and we missed the option to use paper or canvas textures, but it is still one of the best digital art apps available. We especially liked its fantastic selection of pixel brushes, its smooth running and ability to blend brushes.

Built from the same back end as its award-winning desktop version, Affinity Designer for iPad is a vector drawing program that's fully optimised for iOS, including Touch controls and Apple Pencil support. Our testing appreciated the fact it can support huge multi-artboard canvases with as many layers as you could possibly want, and you can zoom to over one million per cent. We also loved the UI – find out more in our Affinity Designer for iPad review.

Affinity Designer supports both CMYK and RGB, and has a full Pantone library in the colour swatch panel, meaning it's ideal for creating both digital and printed art. You can export to a range of formats, including JPG, PNG, PDF and SVG, and there are over 100 brushes available, in styles including paints, pencils, inks, pastels and gouaches. In short, this is one of the few drawing apps for iPad that's squarely targeted at the professional market.

In our Artrage Vitae review we loved the easy to navigate UI that hides many of the deeper functions behind easy sliders and selections, the unique layout ensures the screen is never cluttered and the canvas remains visible. Our tester was disappointed that the paint simulation is better in Rebelle 5, and he also felt that the UI wasn't for everyone. But this is an excellent app for those wanting to get a realistic painting experience.

It is impressive how well the app replicates some aspects of pastel drawing, including soft pastels, oil pastels, pastel pencils, and realistic colour blending using your finger on the screen just like you would on paper. One downside is that you have to stop drawing when you want to adjust the size and pressure of your tool, but there are plus sides – including the ability to correct mistakes quickly and simply.

Some of the best drawing apps for iPad are great if you're proficient at drawing, but not necessarily for newcomers. Learning to draw on a tablet can be less intuitive than learning to draw the traditional way on paper, but ArtWorkout is a nice app for learning how to draw digitally. It has over 500 step-by-step lessons and it analyses your accuracy and stroke quality (without being too critical!). It covers different forms of drawing, from doodles to sketching, and you can choose your skill level, making it suitable for complete beginners and up. It's free to download, but the premium plan costs $7.99 a month.

If you're new to digital art and so after a brilliant-but-basic drawing app for your iPad, look no further than MediBang Paint for iPad. When we reviewed it, we found Medibang to be an easy-to-use program with similar features to Photoshop, including layers, with the ability to add styles and a handy brush editor. In fact, MediBang is full of brilliant drawing and painting tools – so much so that it's hard to believe it's free. See our Medibang review here.

Created specifically for professionals, Concepts is an advanced sketching and design app. It features infinite canvas and organic brushes, a fluid and responsive vector drawing engine, and intuitive precision tools, all tailored for a natural-feeling drawing experience. Whether you’re an architect, product designer, illustrator or visual thinker, you can explore, iterate and share your designs anywhere you go.

You'll also find a digital sketchpad for experimenting with your concepts, and an inking and colouring interface to help you finish your design with various brushes. Comic Draw provides a lettering suite made up of different typefaces, balloons and design tools to add the all-important words, and you can add as many pages as you want to make everything from a comic strip to a full-length book. There's a free trial available before you buy (for $9.99/£9.99).

This app comes packed with drawing tools such as pencils, markers, calligraphy pens and air brushes. And because the drawing engine works so well with the Apple Pencil, you'll have a full range of pressure-sensitive dynamics to get your linework perfect. Another bonus is when you sign up for Clip Studio Paint EX subscription, you get three months free. Check out our list of the best Clip Studio Paint tutorials here.

There's a wide range of digital pencils, pens, markers, and airbrushes to choose from, all accessed via a simple but intuitive UI that enables you to pin your favourite toolbars to the screen. It's flexible and fast, too, enabling you to work with layers, transparency options, annotations and advanced blend modes. With Dropbox integration plus the ability to import and export Photoshop-friendly files, it's an ideal iPad art app for working on the move.

An iPad is great for drawing on, but some people might prefer to see their work on a larger screen. For that, you can use Sidecar to view your iPad screen on your MacBook or iMac, but that's not the ideal solution if you want to use your iPad as a graphics tablet. One popular solution is the iPad drawing app AstroPad Studio. This lets you use your iPad as a graphics tablet, drawing on the touchscreen with your Apple Pencil while you look at the results on your Mac.

This one's not a drawing app for iPad exactly, but a colouring app – perfect for when you want to just turn off and relax or for anyone just getting the feel for using the Apple Pencil to draw digitally. Also available for the iPhone, it offers colouring book sheets in all kinds of styles from artists all over the world. It has a colour wheel where you select the colour you want to use, making it all very clean and intuitive to use. There's also optional audio, so if you use the paint brush, you'll hear brush sounds, use the spray paint and you hear spray sounds. We found it very soothing to use.

There's an option to automatically stay in the lines if you don't want to worry about being too precise, while other options allow you to get a bit more creative than simply colouring in with block colour, allowing you to use shading and other effects. The free version gives you up to nine pages a day to colour. For $10 a month you can get as many as your like, more colour variations and the option to work with a blank canvas.

Is the iPad good for drawing apps?

There are plenty of dedicated drawing tablets on the market, but the experience on the iPad is now so good that many artists use this as their digital art tool of choice. The Apple Pencil 2 has palm rejection and tilt pressure sensitivity, which make it ideal of drawing. And the iPad has the benefit that it can serve as an all-round device for general browsing, media and much more, saving you from having to buy a separate device for drawing.

if you'd prefer to create digital art on a desktop, see our pick of the best digital art software.

Which iPad should I use for drawing apps?

All of the most recent iPad generations support one of the Apple Pencils, so you can use the drawing apps above on any iPad. However, the standard iPad, including the iPad 2022, only supports Apple Pencil 1. Recent Pros, Airs and the most recent mini support Apple Pencil 2, which has some distinct advantages for drawing (see our Apple Pencil vs Apple Pencil 2 to understand the differences.

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Rosie Hilder is Creative Bloq's Deputy Editor. After beginning her career in journalism in Argentina – where she worked as Deputy Editor of Time Out Buenos Aires – she moved back to the UK and joined Future Plc in 2016. Since then, she's worked as Operations Editor on magazines including Computer Arts, 3D World and Paint & Draw and Mac|Life. In 2018, she joined Creative Bloq, where she now assists with the daily management of the site, including growing the site's reach, getting involved in events, such as judging the Brand Impact Awards, and helping make sure our content serves the reader as best it can.

With contributions from

Georgia Coggan

The best drawing apps for iPad