Creating Digital Paintings Made Easy with the Pen & Ink App
Creating Digital Paintings is easy with the “Pen & Ink” application, by Stepping Stone Software, LLC, is a terrific low-cost approach to digital art creation with a focus on watercolor stylings. I use it on my iPad with a plain Bamboo stylus, and find it very easy to use to create digital paintings. The limited version of the app is available for free in the iTunes store, and to upgrade to the full version, the developer charges a reasonable fee of $2.99.
The app allows you to recreate the look of a watercolor painting with a great degree of realism in its brush strokes and textures. There are several tools it offers: two types of erasers, a pen, a pencil, and three types of paintbrushes. Each brush, when selected, allows you to choose the style of stroke/painting effect, the size of the brush, and the opacity of the color being applied.
From the options you can select, there are practically infinite variations of brush strokes and styles you can use to create a doodle or a masterpiece. You can draw with your finger, but I find that using a stylus (even a plain, inexpensive one like mine) helps in control and fine detail. You can also zoom in quite a bit, so creating finer details in your art is easy to do.
The app’s interface is simple and attractive, and though it doesn’t offer much in terms of options, you can learn to use it very quickly. Through trial and error, you can determine how best to create your art–and if you make a mistake, there’s always the “undo” button, which comes in handy when making a digital painting!
Though you can start with a blank canvas (the app also gives a handful of textured, realistic canvas backgrounds), you can also import a picture to work from in the background. You can’t change the transparency of the background image, though, and there are no layers to work with. The app does have its limitations, but overall, I find it to be not only fun to use but very satisfying in making vivid and realistic digital paintings.
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