Digital art has flourished across the length and breadth of this world. Now pursued as an academic subject, digital drawing has also given birth to some renowned artists. Whether you are a professional artist or an amateur learner, you can use some apps on your Mac to explore this creative discipline. And for your help, we have listed the best drawing apps for Mac.
CloudApp’s Mac Screenshot App and CloudApp for iOS. Another option in our Mac snipping tool lineup is CloudApp’s screenshot App. CloudApp is a heavy hitter when it comes to software. They provide solutions for designers, developers, executives, marketing professionals, sales, support, and even production people. Autodesk SketchBook is another great free drawing software you can use to get into digital drawing or especially to make art on-the-go. Sketchbook is available on both PC and Mac platforms as well as for Android and iOS devices. This makes it the perfect app to have on your phone or tablet to draw art anywhere you go. Sketch isn’t a photo-editing app per se, but you can editing images within the Mac prototyping tool. The best part of editing in Sketch is that all edits are nondestructive, meaning that any of your changes take effect without overwriting the original image file. (So you can always go back to the original if you want.).
1. Autodesk Sketchbook
Autodesk Sketchbook has been recommended by professional artists and illustrators for a long time. With its tools and excellent user interface, you can create magic on Mac.
Take a dive into the ocean of creativity, and you will find pearls in the form of 140+ brushes, blending modes, and countless layers. Furthermore, this drawing app is fortified by perspective stroke and guides, rulers, and predictive stroke.
A user-friendly interface makes this app more popular among beginners. They find it extremely easy to change brushes and access tools. Since it is free (without any in-app purchases), it has gained fame among threshold artists.
Price: Free
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2. Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer is for commercial artists, who need to create branding materials. You can easily create marketing collaterals like icons, logos, illustrations, and other stuff.
This Mac drawing app is one of the fastest, smoothest, and precise. It took nearly five years for developers to create this program. And the result is the best tool, panel, and function at your disposal.
Real-time performance, precise vector tools, and sophisticated typography make it the most adorable software for digital artists. To achieve precision in your drawing, you can zoom your document to over 1,000,000%.
Price: $24.99
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3. Tayasui Sketches
The app is free to install and offers in-app purchases for the pro version. It comes with 20 ultra-realistic tools, including pen, Rotring, felt pen, airbrush, acrylic brush, etc. It has some intriguing artistic watercolor brushes that add life to your paintings.
Price: Free (Pro subscription at $ 19.99)
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4. Paint S
Paint S is a free version of Paint Pro. You can upgrade to the Pro version once you achieve dexterity in this free version. Good for freshers, Paint S enables you to draw pictures and edit current photos.
Best Sketch Apps For Macbook
Furthermore, you would love to sketch, crop, rotate and scale images on this Mac drawing app. To make your creation social media-ready, add some text to images.
Among other key features, Paint S can save images in TIFF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and other popular formats. The drawing app supports fill, eyedropper, line, curve, rectangle, ellipse, text, and more.
Price: Free (Paint 2 Pro MemberShip – $2.99)
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5. Paint Pro
While Paint S has almost all features of its Pro version, the latter brings four valuable things in its paid iteration. And this makes all the difference.
Retina display support gives you better clarity and transparency. This is one of the significant additions for any professional artist. Moreover, Pro users can quickly add, edit, and re-edit shapes, text, and images. This is not possible in Paint S.
You can easily choose any part of an image for quick editing. While giving final touches to your creations, this comes as a useful feature.
Finally, Paint Pro enables users to cut, copy, and move parts from one image to another.
Price: $12.99
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6. CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW is mostly used by professionals to create vector illustrations. This app is packed with powerful illustrator tools to convert basic lines and shapes into complex art.
Another important use is creating a page layout. Users can create an awesome design for brochures, newsletters, and page documents on CorelDRAW.
Artists love to customize font, size, spacing, shadows contours, and more. Thus CorelDRAW becomes all the more important for media professionals.
A notable feature of this app is support for Sidecar. If you have updated your Mac to Catalina, create a design on iPad with your Apple Pencil. And check the effects on your desktop.
Price: Free (Monthly subscription – $34.99)
Download
7. Preview on Mac
Finally, Preview on Mac is your all-time partner to create awesomeness. Sharpen your creative skills by doing rough sketches. You can also start with simple drawings. Note that Preview offers some basic tools, which can be used by a greenhorn.
To start with, use tools, shapes, colors, thickness, type, and other features. You can either make some adjustments or create something new.
Preview is a useful app if you don’t want to create full-fledged, complex images. If you are a professional with a few years of experience, you should select more powerful third-party drawing apps for Mac.
That’s all, designers!
Final Stroke…
Every art form demands precision. In your efforts to achieve excellence, use the apps every day. And when you create your masterpiece, don’t forget to share it with us. You can also make this list exhaustive by sending your suggestions and feedback. Leave your responses in the Comments section below.
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Jignesh Padhiyar is the co-founder of iGeeksBlog.com who has a keen eye for news, rumors and all the unusual stuff that happens around Apple products. During his tight schedule, Jignesh finds some moments of respite to share side-splitting contents on social media.
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Essential drawing app for Mac
Macs have always been known as creative machines for creative people. It's likely the reason you actually bought one! So naturally Macs offer a wide variety of opportunities for you to express yourself, whether that’s building apps, writing prose, or drawing.
Having a good drawing app for Mac is priceless. Retina screens, accurate touchpads, and native support for a variety of inputs make sketching on Mac a pleasure. But with so many drawing programs to choose from, how do you pick the right one? Welcome to the no-sweat guide to the best free drawing software for Mac!
Best drawing, design, and editing apps
With Setapp, you don’t have to choose only one — get a large choice of the best drawing software to support your creativity flow.
The Best Drawing Programs On Mac Today
It's not easy to pinpoint the best drawing app for Mac. Is it one of the free drawing programs? Is it made for simple drawings or lets you paint on Mac beautifully? The level of skill has to be considered as well.
The collection of drawing apps below features something that appeals to everyone, from the Mac equivalent of Paint you can find on Windows to a simple drawing pad for Mac to the likes of Sketch software that can be used by professional designers too.
Communicate with the markup feature in Preview
If you just want to do a rough sketch for Mac or a few simple drawings, you don't necessarily need to go about downloading lots of drawing apps, you can just use a drawing app for Mac you've already got — Preview.
While most of us think of Preview as an image or PDF viewer, it's also packs a basic toolset for annotating, drawing, and sketching. To see what you can do with Preview:
- Open an image, document, or just a white sheet in Preview
- Click Show Markup Toolbar in its top menu
- From here you can choose tools, shapes, colors, thickness, type, and more to make necessary adjustments or create something completely new
- Save and share your image
For those who don’t intend to draw complicated scenes, Preview might just might be enough. For everyone else, there are, of course, more powerful third-party apps.
Get nostalgic with Paintbrush
Lots of us remember the simplicity and versatility of Microsoft Paint. Macs used to have a similar app too called MacPaint (that’s been discontinued). Well, good news is some enthusiastic developers took the matter into their own hands and essentially recreated a Paint app for Mac — Paintbrush.
This Mac equivalent of Paint will strike you as a complete duplicate of that old software you used to love. It features all the same tools, including rectangular and oval shapes, paint bucket, pencil, spray, lines, etc. You can also easily switch and add colors to your palette as you go.
Make professional mockups with Sketch
If you’ve already outgrown simple drawings you can do with Preview and Paintbrush, and want to move higher — try Sketch.
Sketch took the world by storm just a few years ago, when they essentially introduced a viable alternative to complex apps like Adobe Illustrator and targeted it specifically to digital design professionals.
Everything you do in the Sketch program is done in vector, which means all shapes are infinitely resizable, in contrast to the raster graphics of Paintbrush. With Sketch for Mac, you can design high-fidelity mockups for your website, prototype your iOS app, or just create complex illustrations.
You can download and try the Sketch software for free, but after a month, you'll be required to pay the annual license fee, which is a big downside if you don’t plan to use the app regularly. In addition, Sketch for Mac is not the most accessible app for beginners and it’s not exactly a drawing app for Mac due to its vector nature.
Create digital art with MediBang Paint Pro
Perhaps an equivalent of Sketch, but in raster graphics, is MediBang Paint Pro. This drawing software for Mac allows you to execute your dreams beautifully with over 50 custom brushes as well as its extensive support for layers and fonts.
Originally developed for comic creators, MediBang Paint Pro got quickly adopted by everyone looking for a versatile drawing pad for Mac and is hailed by many as the best free drawing software around. However, since it was built for the purpose of creating comics, you might face a few problems adapting it to your needs — it’s definitely one quirky drawing app for Mac. Another issue is the app’s slow update release cycle. So far, it’s been unavailable to macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur users due to the lack of security updates from the developers. This means you can only use MediBang Paint Pro on macOS 10.13 or older.
Set your imagination free with Tayasui Sketches
Talking about the best drawing programs, it’s simply impossible to avoid Tayasui Sketches. This intuitive sketch program is universally loved by painters, designers, illustrators, and art aficionados alike.
Ultimate drawing app for Mac
Draw on your Mac’s screen like on canvas with Tayasui Sketches. Mix colors and experiment with limitless layers!
Tayasui Sketches makes it easy to bring what you have in mind to reality with its support for unlimited layers, infinite undos, smart rules, and a wide variety of drawing tools. If you want to paint on Mac, nothing else comes close to representing the physical experience of applying colors to paper than this drawing software for Mac.
To start your drawing pad for Mac with Tayasui Sketches:
- Open a new document
- Try out all the different tools from the sidebar, from a fine pen to an airbrush
- Use supporting menus to modify your currently selected tool and mix just the right color
With just a bit of practice, you’ll see why Tayasui Sketches beats all the free drawing programs out there. Time for your digital painting skills to skyrocket!
Save all the cool colors with Sip
Best Art Apps For Macbook
Regardless of the drawing software for Mac you choose to use in the end, one of the most difficult things to do is going to be finding the right colors out there. Sometimes, you might come across a beautiful color you might use in the future, but where do you save it? Sip.
Sip is the most intuitive, handy, and non-intrusive palette organizer available for Mac. This little utility lives in your Mac’s menu bar, where it saves all the colors you like and simultaneously features a tiny color picker on the side of your screen, which makes Sip instantly available in any sketch program for Mac, like Tayasui Sketches, for example.
By now, you should be well-equipped to start on your Mac drawing journey, using the selection of the drawing software for Mac listed above, whether it’s a simple annotation or a large-scale digital painting.
Best Sketch Program For Mac
Best of all, you can try Tayasui Sketches and Sip for free by signing up for a free seven-day trial on Setapp, a platform for more than 200 unique creative Mac apps that literally help you bring your dreams to reality. Why wait, check it out now!
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
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