By Christopher Phin
There’s no doubt that the Apple Pencil is an impressive design and digital art tool, but to make the most of it you need the right iPad Pro apps – ones that truly take advantage of its power and flexibility.
Happily, as this list shows, there is already a strong roster of iPad Pro apps from companies big and small, which really let the Pencil shine. All you have to supply is talent! (And an Apple Pencil. And an iPad Pro.)
2018 has seen the introduction of third-generation iPad Pros (also known as the iPad Pro 2018) with better processor power and displays than ever before, and the surprise unveiling of a new, second-gen Apple Pencil. Apple Pencil 2 adds wireless charging, double-tap to change tools, and magnetic pairing, which also means you should be less likely to lose it.
Here are 14 great apps that make the most of whichever Apple Pencil you use on your iPad Pro, but are just as comfortable with a fingertip. We have now included information on which apps have been updated with second-generation Apple Pencil double-tap support.
01. Affinity Designer for iPad
Affinity Designer for iPad is quickly becoming the new go-to tool for designers and artists on the go
Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: $19.99/£19.99
The latest offering from Serif, Affinity Designer for iPad is quickly becoming the new go-to tool for designers and artists on the go. And it comes complete with full support for the Apple Pencil’s drawing capabilities in terms of precision, pressure sensitivity and tilt functionality. Fully optimised for iPad without compromising on power, Affinity Designer for iPad offers the functionality of a professional desktop app, adapted to a tablet workflow.
It includes all the core tools for creating on the go, and with a very affordable one-off cost of under $20/£20, you’ll be hard pushed to find a better value iPad Pro app – in terms of both quality and price – for busy creatives.
02. Adobe Illustrator Draw
Adobe’s vector drawing app for the iPad shoots straight to the top of the class
Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: Free
As designers, you will be well aware of the talents on offer from Adobe Illustrator CC, but you may not be familiar with Illustrator Draw. Illustrator Draw is more than just a vector-based digital sketchbook – this drawing app for your iPad has all the popular and most useful features of Ai wrapped up in a simple UI, designed for quickly sketching out ideas and concepts when you’re on the go.
Features include simple vector-based drawing tools with separate drawing and photo layers as well as the ability to sync to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. With this feature, you can also download Adobe Illustrator-compatible files and work with them on your iPad with your Apple Pencil.
The app enables you to draw perfectly straight lines and geometric shapes, rename layers, and use shapes from Adobe Capture CC. An enhanced perspective grid also means you can map shapes to a perspective plane. All told, this is an essential app for iPad-owning Ai users.
03. Autodesk SketchBook
3D specialists Autodesk has created a winning drawing app in Sketchbook
Requirements: iOS 10.0 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: Free
Autodesk may be know in the main for pro-spec 3D apps like 3ds Max and Maya, but in Sketchbook it has a powerful mainstream sketching application with an incredibly natural drawing experience – something that is superbly exploited by the latest iPad Pro’s ProMotion tech and, of course, Apple Pencil.
Featuring 170 customisable brushes, full PSD layer and blending support, and switchable predictive stroke which transforms your hand-drawn lines and shapes into crisp, precise forms, Sketchbook is probably the best free-drawing app around – and incredibly it doesn’t cost a penny, and has no in-app purchases.
04. Procreate
Procreate is the king of natural media apps on the iPad
Requirements: iOS 11.1 or later
Double-tap support: Yes
Price: $9.99/£9.99
This is the king of natural media apps on the iPad, and it is completely transformed with the addition of the Pencil. Sure, you can use your finger with it, a simple stylus, or even one of the increasingly complicated and expensive third-party styluses from the likes of Adonit, but none of these give you the fluidity and analogue-like experience that the Apple Pencil does.
In part this is down to the Pencil’s fine tip, in part the low latency and double-speed sampling rate, and in part because the palm rejection is nearly flawless. But all that technical stuff just fades away into the background when you’re faced with the joy of sketching with a 6B pencil, turning it flat to block in big areas of shade, or mucking about with paints.
The last major release was Procreate 4, boasting a significant technological overhaul, along with a litany of improvements including the introduction of wet paint options and an intuitive redesigned menus. A major update to version 4.2 in late 2018 added support for the third-generation iPad Pro and second-gen Apple Pencil – Clipping Masks, Crop, inking, and Selections have been redesigned for multitouch and Apple Pencil 2, amongst other improvements. Also check Procreate Pocket.
05. Concepts
Concepts is a satisfying sketching and design app to use
Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
Double-tap support: Yes
Price: Free ($9.99/£9.99 Essentials in-app purchase)
Concepts is the award-winning, advanced sketching and design app for professional creators. With infinite canvas and organic brushes, fluid and responsive vector drawing engine, and intuitive precision tools, your design experience has never felt so natural. Whether you’re an architect, product designer, illustrator or visual thinker, you can explore, iterate and share your designs anywhere you go.
Concepts is another iPad Pro app that quickly released a major update following the launch of the second-generation Apple Pencil – double-tap tool switching is supported, plus you can customise how the double-tap manifests itself.
06. Affinity Photo
Requirements: iOS 10.3 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: $19.99/£19.99
Advertisement
Another one from Serif, Affinity Photo is a fantastic Photoshop alternative on Mac and Windows machines thanks to its solid tool set, amazing performance and one-off price instead of a subscription fee. Its iPad version – used by Apple to demo the iPad Pro and Pencil – is no less impressive.
While it’s compatible with earlier iPad models, it’s when you pair it with an iPad Pro and Pencil that Affinity Photo really comes alive. As it’s engineered to make the most of the iPad’s hardware and touch features, Affinity Photo on the iPad Pro is also built to take full advantage of the Pencil’s pressure and angle sensitivity. It’s great for tasks from painting with its professional brush engine, or for applying realtime lighting effects.
Affinity Photo is built for a professional workflow, with support for raw and PSD files as well as full cross-platform performance and file compatibility in case you feel the need to add some final polish on your desktop. But you probably won’t need to.
07. Adobe Comp CC
Create production-ready layouts as smoothly and easily as drawing on paper
Requirements: iOS 9.0 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: Free
The Adobe Comp CC iPad pro app is a revelation, and makes the process of wireframing or mocking up designs a cinch. The idea is that rather than pulling out your notebook and drawing dumb rectangles for pictures or a few horizontal lines to indicate where text would go in a layout, with a few simple and intuitive sketched shapes you can actually start building those layouts for real – and then pass them into InDesign CC, Illustrator CC or Photoshop CC.
It’s worth familiarising yourself with all the different gestures for aligning, grouping and so on so you can work quickly and efficiently. You could do all this with just your finger, but using the Pencil feels delightfully like drawing in a notebook with a magical pencil, where birds you draw come to life and fly off the page.
Draw a rectangle, slash it with a diagonal cross and it becomes an image box that you can populate with assets from, say, your Creative Cloud Library. Draw a box and scrub a few horizontal lines in it, and boom, it’s a text box, which you can style manually (there’s also a handy, quick slider control for point size) or apply styles to from your CC Libraries. Rough squares snap to perfect geometric shapes.
It’s fast, fluid and easy, and while sure, pro designers are likely to work from these wireframes like they would with one drawn in ink in a Moleskine – that is, merely referring to it but building from scratch, rather than importing it from Comp – but it can still be a boon to your productivity to be able to quickly mock up your designs using real live assets and styles.
08. Sharpr 3D
Requirements: iOS 10.0 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: Free, Pro subscription $31.99/£28.99 per month
Advertisement
The Sharpr team claim that Shapr3D is the only truly mobile CAD app, and that may well be true but it is certainly an expensive one if you subscribe to the Pro version – which is the only way to export your work. However, marry this app to an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and you will quickly see what you get for your money – a quick, precise way to create 3D models using the same geometric modelling engine as Solidworks.
And it’s a cinch to use, too – sketch out a shape, add constraints, pull for an extrude or choose from various tools to make 3D from sketches. Then finish off your work by dragging the edges down for a fillet, and move your edges for freeform surfaces. This app is deep-designed for Apple Pencil – you will actually need Cupertino’s smooth stylus to carry out all of Sharpr’s functions.
09. Adobe Photoshop Sketch
Sketch comes with some lovely natural media types built in
Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: Free
Adobe’s announcement that a full version of Photoshop for the iPad is imminent has got the design world in a lather, but until its launch sometime in 2019 we have PS Sketch. Pared-back it may be, but Sketch is genuinely really good, with not only some lovely natural media types built-in (and the option of adding more brushes via Capture CC), but also some features that might quickly endear it to you.
5 things you need to know about Photoshop for iPad
For starters, it can push layered PSDs directly to Photoshop on your Mac or PC, and you can add either a flat grid or even a configurable 3D plane grid to the background, plus preset geometric shapes, to help keep you on the straight and narrow. When you want to go on the wide and sinuous, there are French curves that you can trace against.
But that would be for naught if the natural media tools themselves were rubbish, but in fact they’re generally very nice. Pay attention specifically to the watercolour tool, which has colours bleed into one another in a most pleasing manner.
What’s even nicer is that you can tap an icon – which looks like fan blades – to ‘dry’ the paint so that new colours added on top don’t bleed, giving you some terrific flexibility. The tools are Pencil-aware, so react wonderfully to pressure and tilt differences, but we are awaiting an update that allows for double-tap compatibility.
10. Pixelmator
iPad Pro app Pixelmator makes the most of the Apple Pencil’s features
Requirements: iOS 9.1 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: $4.99/£4.99
We could have recommended Adobe Photoshop Mix here in place of this stalwart iOS bitmap editor – and certainly, the former’s cut-out tools, layers, and paintable filters are generally quite nice – but Pixelmator just feels like the more mature and useful app.
As well as offering some (frankly a little underwhelming) natural media drawing tools that work with the Pencil, it gives you the ability to tweak the colours either by applying Instagram-style filters, or with sliders for brightness, contrast, saturation, RGB and white balance – or indeed by tweaking the curves.
But the pairing of Pixelmator and the Pencil really shine if you want to do some touch-ups or object isolation. The touch-up controls – repair, dodge, burn, sharpen, saturate and more – are easy to apply with the Pencil especially given its precision. When painting out backgrounds this precision, plus the various different eraser types available, are hugely welcome.
If we’ve one criticism, it’s that we’d like the option of pressure-sensitivity to affect the size of an eraser rather than its opacity, but nevertheless this is the closest thing you’re going to find to Photoshop on the iPad – until 2019.
11. Paper
Requirements: iOS 10.0 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: Free, $7.99/£5.49 (Pro)
Advertisement
We’d love to be able to recommend Noteshelf here, which is overall a richer notebook app (albeit one that’s not quite as pretty or simple) but although it has recently added support for the Pencil, it’s very basic – there’s no tilt- or pressure-sensitivity.
Happily, though, Paper by WeTransfer (formerly Paper by FiftyThree) is easy to love. At first glance it might look like a reasonably simple drawing and diagramming tool – and on one level, that’s what it is – but there are some smarts here.
They are frustratingly difficult to discover, but again it’s worth poking around the support files online to understand how the apparently simple tools can be used to create graphs, org charts and Venn diagrams, can easily duplicate shapes, link shapes with lines (with optional arrows at one or both ends) and much more.
Paper doesn’t demand the kind of precision you get from the Pencil, but it’s certainly welcome, and the slightly, delightfully cartoonish media work great with its sensors.
12. Evernote
Evernote is a rich, capable iPad Pro app
Requirements: iOS 10.3 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: Free (Basic), $4.99/£4.99 per month (Premium)
Ah, Evernote. Now, this definitely isn’t for everyone. For some, this uber-notebook has become an indispensable place for gathering websites, sketches, notes, to-do lists and more – the detritus of modern life as well as inspiration and creative work – but for others it’s just a bit baffling and never quite clicks.
It’s definitely rich and capable, though, and the ability to record audio – during a briefing meeting, say, while you sketch ideas for a client – using its simple but effective drawing tools is great (though this isn’t the only app to offer that, of course). It’s pleasing how the eraser tool creates nicely rounded ends to the ink strokes rather than just slicing them into sharp points.
Using the Pencil rather than a dumb stylus or your finger gives you a more expressive line since it’s pressure sensitive, but more importantly the palm rejection means that you can lean your hand on the screen like you would with paper, and Evernote won’t get confused and make marks where your hand is resting.
13. LiquidText
This PDF document reader enables you to annotate and excerpt texts
Requirements: iOS 9.3 or later
Double-tap support: Yes
Price: Free, $29.99/£28.99 (Pro)
Even without a Pencil, this is a handy tool for reading and annotating PDFs, Word and PowerPoint documents, and web pages. It’s designed to support ‘active reading’, so as you’re reading you can be highlighting and snipping out sections to refer to later, collapsing sections of a document down so you can refer to disparate bits of it at once, and more.
Add in the Pencil, though, and it becomes even faster to use, and it’s a great example of how the Pencil’s pressure- and tilt-sensitivity can be used not just to mimic real-world drawing tools.
Dragging the Pencil over text instantly selects it (rather than having to tap-and-wait with your finger), pressing harder selects any part of the document as an image, and dragging across text with the Pencil held at a flattened angle selects and highlights it. Smart.
Plus, it has been updated for the 2018 iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, including configurable double-tap compatibility.
14. uMake
This 3D drawing app makes great use of the Apple Pencil
Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
Double-tap support: No
Price: 14-day free trial, $12.99/£11.49 per month
We’ll come clean: despite its assurances that it ’empowers anyone to create 3D designs easily and intuitively’, we don’t have the chops to produce anything remotely impressive in this 3D drawing app, but we can nevertheless see that it makes great use of the Pencil.
The idea is that you can sketch in 2D – optionally making use of smart symmetry controls – and then extrude your designs or even draw entirely in 3D space, connecting points on different planes.
Even if you’re a bit clumsy and jittery, your lines are smoothed into flowing curves, and with practice we can see that it would be possible to create some elegant, organic forms at speed – and the precision of the Pencil’s tip will make this whole process simpler than with any other stylus.
It might get frustrating for highly technical engineering work, but you can always use it as a tool for getting an initial concept down before exporting to IGES or OBJ files so you can work it up in other apps. Version 2.0 sees SketchUp support, meaning you can import and open .SKP files directly in uMake, but exporting to .SKP format is not yet available – however, it is in the pipeline.
