Friday 23 January 2015

Favourite drawing apps for Ipad and crafting

I have tried quite a few drawing apps since getting my Ipad a few years ago. By far and the way the best I have found is Idraw. (now called Graphic) Some of the features I like are:
  1. Easy use and adjustment of Bezier curves
  2. easy copying of a shape and rotating around a point to a specific degree angle
  3. several choices of how to save a drawing (jpeg, gifs SVG etc) and with or without the background
  4. Several choices of how to share the drawing with other apps. e.g. You can save to Dropbox or email the drawing to yourself.
  5. Zoom in facility using two fingers allows for fine detail work and you see through a magnifying glass pop up window so you can actually join one line to another 
  6. Layers - very useful for drawing an outline in black then trying out various colours for filling in
  7. you can outline text for use with cutting in Silhouette Cameo, or using with laser cutters
  8. The page can be set to mm, cms or inches etc
  9. There a few on line tutorials which I found useful e.g. for getting text to follow a path such as a circle
  10. You can import your own favourite fonts via Dropbox. That alone is awesome!
  11. You can import a design made elsewhere (e.g. in Inkbot) and use it as a background within a shape.

This is an app for Ipad and I like to use it for more sketch-like drawings. It is not available for Android. Unfortunately it does not have layers, but the "undo" facility means you can recolour a shape more than once. The video is a bit frenetic, but gives you an idea of what you can do with Paper. It is very different to Idraw, but by using the two together I get all I want.

This is supposed to be the equivalent to Inkscape the open source vector drawing software for pcs and Macs, but I have found it more limited (for me anyway) in its functionality.

Do you have a favourite app I should know about?

4 comments:

  1. Fabulous and fun card Hilary with lots of cheery colours
    Thanks so much for sharing and taking part.
    Sarah xx
    Less is More

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  2. Oh my Goodness this all seems very techy and I am in awe of your abilities! I wouldn't know where to start.
    Your card for LIM looks superb!
    Thanks so much
    Chrissie
    "Less is More"

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    Replies
    1. Aww. Thanks Chrissie. I eat up technology, but I am a rotten cook! Best wishes
      Hilary

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