There is a whole new world of cool new art apps, drawing apps, and painting apps out there. These apps are useful from making children’s book illustrations to online illustrating classes, enabling you to create cool artwork that will make an online illustration portfolio among the best for your clients and customers.
But finding the best art apps is not an easy task, and that is why we have bucketed a list of some of the most popular, powerful, interesting, and best art apps that you can use to impress your customers and clients.
Best Art Apps

Below are the best art apps that you should use for your creative work;
Adobe Photoshop

It is impossible to include Adobe Photoshop in a list of best art apps. The app is still a top performer and best art app for creative professionals. The app can work with almost every platform, including Windows, iOS, Mac, Android, etc.
The app has the ability to handle anything you throw at it. The app features incredible brush controls, including impersonating the way real brushes and pencils work on paper and canvas, as well as also offers an incredible paint-blending mode to simulate oil painting viz mixing.
Some of its considerable highlights include;
- Brush management
- Brush smoke smoothing
- Curvature pen tool
- Lightroom photo access
- Paint symmetry
- Group layer arranging
- Luminance and color masking controls
- Variable fonts
Adobe Illustrator Draw

Adobe Illustrator Draw is a go-to choice for vector art. The app is used to create everything ranging from basic graphic design tasks, such as logos to elaborate and breathtaking landscapes and portraits. The user interface of the app is distinctive, clean, responsive, and requires very little learning practice.
Brushstrokes of the app perform as you expect them to perform, as well as the interface offers a whole lot of incredible features. As the app is an Adobe product, so you can count on great support and updates.
Some of its best highlights include;
- Zoom up to 64x to apply finer effects
- Draw sketches with five pen tips, with customizable size, color, and capacity
- Multiple layers and images
- Adjust and merge each layer, as well as rename and duplicate them
ArtFlow

Aftflow is another best art app. The app is free and comes with tons of features. It can turn your device into a digital artbook and contains about 80-plus brushes, smudge, eraser, and fill tools. The app can be used as a playground, as well as to create serious art.
The free version of the app allows users to save their artwork in PNG and JPG formats, while the pro version fo the app also supports PSD format. The app can be run on almost every platform, including iOS and Android devices to Windows. Some of its highlights include;
- High-performance paint engine
- Canvases up to 6144×6144 with about fifty layers
- Numerous brushes and tools
- Feature to create custom brushes through imported images
- Selection and selection masks
- Ten layer filters
- Pressure simulation for touches
Autodesk Sketchbook

The app is considered as the best sketch app in the world by the majority of professionals. The app features incredibly responsive stylus control, a straightforward user interface, compatibility with almost every platform, a free version with some incredible features, as well as a pro version with affordable pricetag with unlimited amazing features.
The app is a useful platform to practice portrait art in a digital medium and enables its users to represent their creative work to the world with ease through its in-built social media platforms. Moreover, users can also switch and move their artwork from one device to another comfortably. The app is worth purchasing to make the most out of it. Some of its key highlights include;
- Simple and intuitive sketching
- About three layers with basic functionality
- Distort transform feature
- New perspective guides
- Easy to use and simple user interface
- It is free with limited but incredible features
- Share creative work to social media platforms within the app
Astropad Studio

Astropad is a unique app that provides great help to users who are searching for a platform to create digital drawings. The app is an ultimate wireless drawing app for tablets created for the most demanding creative work. With a comprehensive workspace personalization, the app allows users to work quickly and efficiently.
The user interface fo the app is quite smooth, but you are required to ensure that you have a clean system with a lot of free memory to prevent straying. Some of its key features include;
- Crystal clear and ultra-fast
- Gesture shortcut customization
- Customizable pressure curves
- Sync your setting across your devices
- Keyboard support
- Wifi and USB connectivity support
Clip Studio Paint

The app is created focusing on manga and anime, and the specialized art tools offer numerous great features that will lead to inspiring pieces of artwork. The app is a serious asset for professionals who love this for its great features that help to create a drawing, painting, animation, comics, and more.
To get a six months subscription, which is free, a user has to sign up for the EX version of the app. Moreover, the app has multiple exporting options, such as animated GIF’s or movie, as well as support apple pencil, and Wacom bamboo sketch. The app also allows users to create moving illustrations. Some of its key features include;
- Create manga and comic effect lines automatically
- Vector formats to draw customizable comics without compromising quality
- The perfect tool for illustrations
- Create moving illustrations
- Professional grade animation drawing functions
- Advanced exporting functions
- Unlimited screen tones for comics and manga
- Create and store your own colors
- Realistic and natural pen strokes to draw with
uMake

uMake is an award-winning and best art app. It is an iPad drawing app for 3D design. The app offers the features of desktop CAD modeling on the iPad. It enables CAD professionals and keeners of 3D modeling to create 3D content on the go.
The app allows users to create accurate and smooth vector-based curves and surfaces by using NURBS. Then export your design files in batches to STEP, IGES, STL, OBJ file formats, and continue working on other 3D and CAD apps, such as SketchUp, Solidworks, Autodesk Fusion 360, Autodesk Alias, Procreate, Blender, Concepts, Photoshop, Rhino, and much more. The app gives more depth to your creative work through Apple pencil on your iPad device. Some of its key features include;
- Easy to use drawing experience
- Import SketchUp files from the desktop to uMake
- Mirroring and symmetry tools
- Layers and geometry grouping
- View designs in augmented reality
- Various pre-made models to get started with
- Mass modeling using Pull and Push
PaperColor

PaperColor is another best art app. While the majority of other apps give a modern, minimal UI, the app lays the pens and brushes out in front of its users. The app features an incredible portfolio display and one of the most extensive and distinctive brush collections of any art app. It is an incredible painting app which is imitating the paintbrush to draw graffiti and doodles. Moreover, the app features multiple styles of paintbrush and color library that help users to create perfect artworks.
Some of its key highlights include;
- Handwriting signature after completing the work
- Draw doodle and graffiti
- Easy to paint, learn to paint
- Multiple paintbrush and color library
- Create perfect artworks
Krita

Krita is yet another best art app. Although it is new in the business but rapidly becoming a powerhouse that is unmatchable of what it does. The artwork you can create in this tiny app is incredible. The toolset of the app is easy to use. It is a free and open-source painting app designed by artists that want to see inexpensive art tools for everybody.
The dynamic brush tool in the app can be used to create drag and mass and smoothen and stabilize brush strokes. The app features more than nine brush engines, including a smudge engine and shape engine through which users can customize their brushes, to meet particular requirements. Some of its key highlights include;
- Clean and flexible interface
- Dark and light color themes
- Vector and text
- Beautiful brushes
- Brush stabilizers
- Creative sketching and painting
- Create concept art, textures, cartoons, and more
Blender

Blender is another best art app and an open-source, free 3D app, which supports modeling, animation, rigging, rendering, simulation, motion tracking, video editing, 2D animation, and more. The app is designed by experts from various creative fields across the world. The app features an in-built powerful path-trace engine offering real results.
Moreover, it features advanced sculpting and other tools through which users can draw and transform models comfortably. The app features a smooth and flexible interface that helps to adjust layouts, fonts, colors, and more. Additionally, multiple add-ons can be used by anybody using the software. Some of its key highlights include;
- Smooth and flexible interface
- The high-end production path tracer
- Animation toolset
- Game creation
- Rendering, fast rigging, and GPU rendering
- Visual effects
- Camera and object motion tracking
- Multiple add-ons that can be used by anyone
Conclusion
There are tons of art apps available out there that can be used to create manga, comics, animations, drawings and paintings, and much more. These apps support almost every major platforms. Some of these apps excel in vector art, and some in graphic illustrations.
Above, we have bucketed a list of some of the best art apps that are not only free but also come with tons of unique features and can be operated by both professionals and beginners. These apps are best for creating manga, animations, comics, and drawing and painting. If you are in search of the best art apps that you can use on your iOS, Android, and desktop devices, then you should try these apps.
If you have any ideas regarding the best art apps, you can comment on us without any hassle to make this list more comprehensive.
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FAQ
Below are some most asked questions by multiple users;
Q: What kind of apps do artists use?
Ans: Some of the best art apps that are recommended by professionals include ArtStudio, Procreate, Typedrawing, Artnear, iDraw, and Art Authority.