Colorful Cow

I love love love painting on my iPad Pro. Well, I should say that when I love it I love it. That is to say that typically, I am drawn to painting in oils but there are a lot of times I just want to be able to sit on the couch, grab my iPad, and just paint. No setup, no cleanup. Also, the other half of myself is a graphic designer which makes me a bit of a technology junky and an Apple fanatic. I love being able to zoom in for details, to be able to hit undo/redo, and let's face it, the creation of the super-sized iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil is an irresistible combination!

Colorful Cow
Procreate in iPad Pro
PRINTS AVAILABLE ON ETSY

Big Yellow

Oh how I've missed digital painting! Apple finally made good on the release of their second generation iPad Pro. The iPad Pro paired with the Apple Pencil is simply heavenly!

Big Yellow
Digital Painting
PRINTS FOR SALE on Etsy!

Feeding Time

Feeding Time
Procreate on iPad
Prints Available on Etsy

Detail - Chickadee and Titmouse

Detail - Wren

I have become a bit of a birder over the past several years. I'm not sure if it started with the purchase of a camera, or the sighting of a hawk outside my office window (see below). For some reason it took me a while to recognize that in myself but I now clearly realize that I love watching birds. Heck, I love all animals, maybe that's why it feels weird to specifically single out birds.

A few weeks ago I was up early and painted an empty feeder, as birds have come along I've taken photos and have added them. Although these particular birds weren't actually all there at the same time it's not abnormal for me to look out and see 7 birds on the two side-by-side feeders. It's quite a sight! Who needs television? HAH!

Hawk on a limb outside my office window a few years ago.

My latest obsession is hummingbirds! I just love these little guys.

Hummingbirds - composite of four different photos taken near one of the feeders

I recently got a hummingbird feeder, which quickly turned into three hummingbird feeders, and have been thoroughly enjoying watching them! It's amazing how they just all showed up as soon as the feeders went out! I can see them perched up in nearby trees, on the fence, etc. keeping and eye on their feeder of choice. They're quite something and they just might be the subject of a future painting...

Colorado Bunny

Colorado Bunny
Procreate app on iPad
Prints Available on Etsy

Detail

A couple years back I went to Colorado to visit my friend who'd just had her first baby. One morning we went for a walk and this bunny was just hanging out watching us go by. He even posed for me to take a picture so I, of course, did. S/He been on my "to paint" list ever since and I've finally managed to get to it.

Puppies in the Mountains

Riley in the Mountains
Procreate on iPad

Above is another plein air, or if you'd prefer a digital painting from life, of my puppy Riley. This was done this past weekend while we were in the mountains. Riley and I were relaxing on the deck. He on his bed, I on a porch swing. I didn't get to work on it long because he got up to check things out.

Mountain Puppies
Morgan, my baby girl (top left)
Riley, my baby boy (bottom right)

Look at that big grin! I'm pretty sure they enjoyed themselves! That makes me a very happy puppy mama!

Twisted

Twisted
Plein Air
Procreate App on iPad
Prints Are Available on Etsy

For a long time I have been dying to get a pochade so I can do some plein air painting. In particular I've had my eye on one of the Alla Prima boxes. They are very beautiful, hand-crafted boxes! I may still end up getting one at some point, but recently I've decided to give my iPad a shot for plein air. Why not? I already love painting on it. There are so many benefits of painting on an iPad, no mess, no lugging heavy paints, boxes, tripods, etc around.

I was up in the mountains this past weekend staying in a lovely "cabin" "camping". Why the quotes? I grew up camping, sleeping on the ground, in a tent. Luxury camping was a KOA cabin where you had to walk up the hill to use bathrooms and take a shower (a SHOWER while camping? I was bowled over the first time I heard of this). To me, if it has running water and electricity (not to mention the three stories, wrap around deck, foosball table, hot tub...) it is no longer a cabin, we now call that a house. How can one say they are camping when they are sleeping in a house? I'm not sure how but that's what we were calling it. Well, so, while "camping" in the "cabin" last weekend I spent a lot of time outdoors, and I did a few plein air paintings on my iPad in my favorite painting app, Procreate. I found this cool little twisty tree by a creek and above is the end result.

It was so peaceful up there and so nice spending 3 days without a television always running and not even wanting to have my phone on me. I'm rather sad to be back.

iPad Painting Apps

For the past two years, since purchasing my iPad, I have been painting in the Procreate app and have absolutely loved it! I tried a couple of other apps, read reviews about many, and compared the features of each one. In the end I chose Procreate and have not regretted my decision one bit. Procreate just feels right to me. There are many great apps out there and ultimately the decision is based on what each individual is looking for. For whatever it's worth, here's my experience with a few of them.

ArtRage - $4.99

This is a fantastic app. Absolutely so cool you will just love to play around with it! The tools are exactly what you'd find in your traditional setup. You can even take a virtual tube of paint and squeeze it out across the canvas. It looks and feels just like the real thing, it's amazing! You can even see the depth/thickness of the paints on the canvas. Have I mentioned it's amazing!? It truly is! One caveat...because it is so cool, it takes up every drop of energy my iPad2 32G has to give. Now, would it be better on an iPad4? I do not know. I would imagine that the new iPad4 128G is better suited for this app, however, as I don't have one of those I can't say. I can only say that when I tried this out for the first time, I got maybe 10% through my painting and got so sick of the lack of memory warning, shutdowns, and loss of work, that it just wasn't worth using.

ArtRage

Brushes - Free? Kind of...

OK, so this app is currently listed as free. An interesting idea which I can't decide how I feel about it. On the one hand, you can use this app and get a feel for whether you like it or not without spending a dime. That's definitely a nice idea. My hangup is that each feature I want costs money. Right off I didn't spend more than a couple minutes in this app before looking for the layers only to find that you much purchase layers. $2.99 for 10 layers. That might not be so bad except that I already purchased Brushes for my iPhone back when I didn't have an iPad and brushes was NOT free and which included layers. So, for me, to buy a second time what I already had leaves me very disgruntled. While this might be a great app, and I know many people do love it. I haven't looked at this app, except to take this screen shot, since making that discovery.

Brushes

ArtStudio - $2.99

One feature which I used in the painting below and really liked was the gradient tool. I used that to create the beginning of the background. Once I had the gradient I wanted I went back in with a brush and played with it a bit more. It was a great starting point. I can see using that tool in the future then importing the background from ArtStudio into Procreate.

ArtStudio

Another feature in ArtStudio which I liked was the way you can save a color palette along the right side of the screen which is always available. You can also save 36 more favorite colors inside the color palette which is easily accessed by clicking on the top color icon on the right.

ArtStudio

You can also turn all palettes off in ArtStudio by clicking on the icon in the top/right corner of the screen, so there is that option if you're looking to get rid of the clutter.

ArtStudio

ArtStudio has customizable brushes which is a must, though once I get one I like I tend not to change the shape much. I do adjust the opacity and size quite often depending on the area which I'm working on.

ArtStudio

Procreate - $4.99

Procreate offers the ability to save 84 favorite colors inside of the color palette and has no permanently open, on-screen color palette. I do like that there is more screen real estate available without the palette on the right, however, I also enjoy having the colors so readily available in ArtStudio. So, that's one of those things where for me, it would just depend what mood I'm in which I prefer. If there is a way to hide all of the tools in Procreate, I don't know of it yet, though with such a minimalist setup I can't say that I've ever felt the need for it.

Procreate

Customizable brushes. There are many options here!

Procreate

Special effect brushes. These are a new addition to Procreate and must be purchased. They do look very cool, though I haven't bought any and don't see myself doing so in the near future.

Procreate

Summary

My personal favorite app is still Procreate. It is a dream to paint in and has all of the functionality I'm looking for laid out in a way which works very well for me.

If you love Photoshop and want to paint in an app which feels nearly just like it then ArtStudio is for you. Having said that I love Photoshop and use it solidly for graphic design, however when I'm sitting down to do a digital painting, for some reason I prefer something a little different.

I LOVE layers! One thing you can be sure of, if a painting app doesn't offer layers, that's an app I will not be purchasing. Inspire is among the apps which I've looked into and almost purchased. I would love to try Inspire some day but I just can't see buying it if it doesn't have layers, I know myself and I will not be happy.

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Hawk on the iPad

Hawk
Procreate App on iPad
Prints available on etsy

There was very little down-time over the holidays however I was able to sneak onto my iPad a bit and I  painted this Christmas week. This is from the same hawk photo which I'm referencing for the oil painting (which I'm still working on...).

I really enjoy the vibrance of painting on the iPad and though I recently did a painting in the Art Studio app (I'll be posting that soon), I still find Procreate to feel the most natural to me. Procreate has recently added some upgrades as well which I'm really pleased about! They now allow you do save Procreate files as native files in dropbox. This allows you to remove them from the iPad to save space and load them back on later if you want to work on them some more. There is also the ability to export as a layered/editable Photoshop file, png, or jpg file. As a graphic designer/illustrator, I own Photoshop so I love this! I am able to make changes on my computer if I want. Usually I'd just make the changes in the original file on the iPad, but sometimes I see a little thing once it gets onto my computer and I love having the option of making the adjustment there.

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Lily of the iPad

This weekend my PenGo stylus came in so I played around with that quite a lot and I love it! Now I just need to find or make a little case to carry it in so I don't lose the extra tip or scratch up my iPad when I throw it in the iPad case.

This is a painting I did over the weekend on my iPad using the PenGo and the Procreate app. I worked from a reference photo which I took a couple years ago while visiting Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, GA. I have looked at this photo numerous times with the intention to paint it and the iPad just seemed like the perfect place to finally do it. I do love making a mess with traditional paints but I think I equally love having the option NOT to.

Water Lily—Callaway Gardens, GA
Procreate App on iPad
Prints available on Etsy

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