Q:Why Paper and not a more detailed drawing app like Sketchbook, etc?

tonycoblog

I tried a lot of the detailed drawing apps and they ended up seeming really, well, fussy.  Too many buttons and levers and adjustments and things to tweak.  Paper just feels a lot more like picking up a pen (or pencil, or brush) and getting right at it.  Probably similar to my Getting Sh-t Done philosophy (http://www.utilware.com/gsd3.html), now that I think of it.

Also, and this is really key, the various tools allow you to layer color in a way I haven’t found in other apps.  You can easily add multiple levels of shading just by going over a particular region of the screen a second time, and that’s really fantastic for getting real depth and texture to a drawing.  As a matter of fact, I had never really played much with colorizing my drawings until Paper came along, and now I love it.

I’ve only noticed a few downsides to Paper as I use it:

  • Limited color palette
  • When using the watercolor brush, all drawings from Paper start to look alike because of the tell-tale clumping of color
  • If you hand your iPad to someone to look at your drawings, they can easily accidentally put a huge line across the picture when trying to turn pages, and if you don’t stop them fast enough, they’ll go to the next page and then you can’t undo the mark
  • Oh, and I really wish I could zoom in to do more detail-level work.  But then again, I’m worried that allowing zoom would make it exactly the fussy apps that I’ve been avoiding so far.

How about you?  What apps do you like?

2 Notes/ Hide

  1. utilware posted this