The other day I was having a twiddle and fiddle with my iPad, as you do – and I opened up a couple of my art applications. I haven’t opened these applications for a wee while, but I do like drawing. I did used to be an art teacher and an artist that did some drawing everyday. So it wouldn’t be surprising that I have an interest in applications either on my Mac or on iOS to use for creating visual art. One of the things that I did find when I was an artist was that it was a very time-consuming thing to do. I determined that if I wanted to earn money as an artist, I would have to find a way to use those skills in some way other than being a fine artist. A fine artist being a person that paints pictures and draws in a way that even famous or not famous artists have done In the past, painters such as Picasso, Kandinsky or Manet.

So for 12 years I ran a business as a signwriter and designer, which to a large extent satisfied my creativity. I would be making creative decisions daily and had occasions when I could be really creative as part of the work. Having said all of that, I have found that my drawing skills through lack of use have declined over the years. So it was quite interesting when I decided to pick up the iPad and have a look at my drawing applications that I have collected over the last year or so and see what I have. There have been one or two that I tried and didn’t keep, but the ones that I have on the iPad now are – Procreate , ArtStudio, Ink Artist and ArtRage.

Procreate

I like the application called Procreate and this is because it is easy to work with and has some very good tools. There is a good range of brushes for sketching, inking, painting, airbrushing, texture brushes and abstract brushes. It is even possible to create your own favourite brushes. All you have to do is do a double tap on a brush and you can get to the controls to further customise any brush whether you have made it yourself or not. You get to change things like spacing and scatter as well as how the stroke that you make on the page is tapered, both at the start and the finish of the line. In fact there are six sets of properties that you can change, the stroke, shape, grain, dynamics, general and the source of a texture. As you make changes to the settings you get a visual to show you what your new brush will look like. The brush settings will apply also to the smudge tool and the eraser tool, so that whether you’re putting colour on, moving the colour around or taking it off, you do have full creative control.

As you would expect with any properly featured drawing and painting tool you do get layers. I think it is possible to have as many as 16 layers and you get five different sets of blend modes. That works out to 17 different types of layer blending. You can make adjustments to the opacity of the blend using an on-screen gesture. The colour picker works pretty well, with you easily able to change the hue and saturation, you can make all the changes that you need to with the three sliders. If you make a colour that you want to choose and use again you can drag the colour into the palette to story for later. There seems to be plenty of place for storing a good selection of colours. You can also choose a colour from your image by tapping and holding. This will be very handy if you’re working from a reference image that has colours within it that you want to use.

Other controls for your Procreate tools

On the right side of the screen you have a slider controlling the size of the tool and underneath that there is a slider which controls the opacity. It is good to have these handy when you are making a drawing. Over in the top left-hand corner of the screen there is the button for the Gallery. This will take you back to the start page where you can choose to start a new image or to work on one that you have already begun. Next to that there is an icon with a wrench or spanner that gives you access to some other options, such as getting an image from your photos, camera or from Dropbox. You will also find your sharing and exporting possibilities within that pop-up dialog.

Getting help and Choosing a Stylus

If you choose the More Info tab you will see the guides, access to tutorials, help and resources. There are some styli that will work using Bluetooth and you can also set up a specific stylus for iOS to work with Procreate. I can’t really comment on those styli because I don’t have any of the stylus devices in the list. I am tempted to buy one though to see if I get even better control than I do when I’m using the stylus that I already have. It is even possible in Procreate app for iOS to set up the interface to be suitable for a left-handed person.

What is it like to actually use Procreate

The brushes that are available are very good and very usable. I quite often find myself drawing and adding texture very intuitively. I find that the layers work very well and it is useful also to have the undo button in case I need to redo a line or whatever else I have added to the drawing. After looking at other applications such as ArtStudio , it would be nice to have some way to make selections, flood fills and also Fountain fills.

I do like the textured brushes that you can get in Procreate for iPad, for example, there is one set called elements that allows you to create background textures such as flames, smoke, water, crystals and others. For quite a while this application Procreate was my favourite, but now it is probably a joint favourite with ArtStudio.

ArtStudio For Digital Painting and Drawing

In some ways I like this application more than I like Procreate. This application is more painterly in its approach in the way that if you are moving your brush across an area with a colour it will act as if you are working on wet paint. So you will see a mixing of the paint that would be similar to the way that wet paint would mix on a canvas in the real world with either oils or acrylics. You can also set the amount of wetness of the paint and you get a live preview of how this works in the settings dialog. There are lots of options that you can use for the brush settings to give you a virtually infinite way of applying your digital paint. This is the case whether you’re using the round brush, the flat brush, the airbrushing tool or whichever.

Pointilist Painter

There is a paintbrush setting for painting with dots, very handy for the pointillist artists out there. One thing that you should remember when you’re messing with these settings for this tool, is that you should not forget to scroll down to find more options available. I was quite surprised the first time that I did this, to find that there was loads more settings available, such as the ability to do random flip of the dots and also various settings for the jitter. Fortunately, there is a preview window at the top of the settings area which lets you see what you’re getting with the changes you make in each area of the dialog box.

There is also an eraser and a smudge tool, both of which have a huge variety of settings that you can tweak. With the Artstudio application you get a bucket fill tool which is handy if you need to fill either a complete layer or a selected area within a layer. There is a normal mode and a smart mode and I haven’t yet worked out the difference between the two of those settings yet. You also get the ability to do a gradient fill. There are six different types of gradient shape. You can also have the gradient going from one colour to another colour or from a colour to transparent. Then you can change whether the gradient repeats or is mirrored. Loads of creatve possibilities in ArtStudio for iPad

Adding text to your design in ArtStudio

Being able to add text to your design can be very useful indeed. This means that you can take your painting and turn it into a poster. There are only a small number of fonts available, but you can choose the colour you want to use and also add a drop shadow. The drop shadow controls are not particularly good as they don’t seem to be any controls for the amount of blur of the shadow. Neither is there a control for how far the shadow should be from the text. Even though the text tools are not great, it is a welcome addition to have text available within the application.

Selection tools

It is the selection tools that makes ArtStudio a much better application than Procreate. There are six selection tools available, there is the circle and the square, then you have two types of lasso tools. There are also a couple of tools that are kind of magic wand type of tools. Then on top of this there is another set of controls that you get to from a menu on the top of the screen. This is where you can select all, deselect, inverse the selection and so on. You can also expand or contract your selection by entering a number of pixels when prompted. You can also apply transformations to your selection.

The ArtStudio menubar

Within the menu bar at the top, which can be hidden if you want to, you get even more settings. You can set the drawing mode so that you are drawing with smooth lines, straight lines, squares, circles or with straight lines that are joined together. From the image menu you can resize the drawing call change the canvas size as well as flip it or rotate it.

The Adjust Menu is something that you will mostly use if you’re going to do some work with photos within the application. You have all of the brightness, contrast, exposure, colour balance and so on, but from this menu you can also invert colours, turn it to monochrome or even turn a specific colour in the image to transparency. Handy if you need to make a transparent backgound on your image.

A set of nine filters

Blurring, sharpening, noise, borders and vignettes along with various stylisations such as embossing, diffusion, wind and drop shadows give you all sorts of opportunities for turning a good picture into something weird. In the colour section of this filters menu, you can apply filters such as hot autumn, heat map, cheap camera or x-ray. It is a good job that there is an undo key that will let you turn back the clock on some bad artistic decisions. This app is giving you some of the filtering you can use in something like Instagram. Use with these filters with care is what I would say. Often less is more, if you get my drift.

Using the iOS app Artstudio to draw and paint on iPad

I really do like this application for all of the creative options that it gives. I like that I can use the selection tools to create circles and squares. Then if I want to use drawing modes to creates straight lines and shapes, but made with some of the brushstrokes, I can do that to. It would be nice to see more colour palettes available on the colour choices on the right-hand side of the screen, although it is good to have the ten quick colour picks readily available.

The options that you have with the layers in ArtStudio are very good indeed. You can merge down layers, and flatten images and it is even possible to add a mask. It is nice and easy to move layers up and down levels and it is a good thing to be able to lock a layer if necessary.

The NoStylus verdict on Procreate versus ArtStudio

Overall I find that the ArtStudio is the more capable of the two drawing and painting applications. Having said that I do also really like the application Procreate and for this reason I would recommend that if you are into digital drawing and painting with the iPad that you should have both of these applications available. Neither of these two applications are expensive and it wouldn’t be difficult either to move drawings from one app to another if you needed to have access to all of the facilities offered by them. I do recommend that if you’re going to use these applications that you get yourself a stylus. Before choosing which iPad stylus you’re going to get, have a look to see which ones are supported by the apps. For example if you use the Pogo Connect, this stylus will give you some pressure sensitivity which in many cases will be useful. I have found that with ArtStudio if I need to have a line which varies in thickness during its length, changing the speed with which I draw the line affects its width. Moving the stylus faster gives a thinner line.

More iPad drawing apps to consider

Another iPad drawing and painting application worth looking at is called ArtRage. It is very painterly in the way that it works and has a quite innovative interface for the choosing of the drawing and painting tools and also for colours choosing. There is another application called Ink Artist, I have only downloaded this one recently so I am still familiarising myself with it, but it does look very good. I will do a more in-depth review of these two applications in the next article on NoStylus.

Part of the reasons we all like to post to Twitter and Facebook is how we like to keep a record of ourselves. That can be for our own consumption or it can be to talk to the world. People have kept diaries since for ever, writers like Samuel Pepes who documented the time of the great fire of London and the plague. SO it is no surprise that we continue to do journalling in the form of social networking. Here a couple of apps that you can use to document your life and be active on Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook at the same time.

Social Diary iOS app

Everyday.me, Day One and Hojoki

Journalling or keeping a diary

There can be a number of reasons why you might want to keep a journal or a diary. You may want to record your thoughts and the things that you do for posterity, you might even have something interesting to say. It is possible that you might keep a diary in order to keep yourself honest in terms of getting things done. It is so easy to get distracted and off-track in terms of what you had planned to, by writing down what you do each day you can keep on top of this. That is in fact the angle that I take in terms of using the application Day One.

I am using an application called OmniFocus to organise myself with regards the GTD. It is the best application out there for such a task and to some extent for me, it is more like a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Just the same though, if you own a Ferrari you can also use it to drive down to the shops at the end of the road at 20 mph. OmniFocus is more of a pre-emptive strike in being organised and I follow up with the actual Day One note to write down what I would like to do for the day. This can be more of a narrative and less of a hard faced list. Then as the day progresses I can write down notes about the things that I have actually managed to complete. I can also write about problems that might have waylaid me along the way.

Social Diary, Everyday.me and Hojoki

I use an application to tell me when there are applications that have become free called Appsfire. Sometimes there is a special offer and the application is free just for a day or possibly even a week. I like to try out lots of different applications so I will download these and give them a try. One of these applications was Social Diary and although I like it and find it interesting and useful, it will not be taking over from Day One. What is good about it is, that it will bring in posts that you have made on the social networks. You have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. What makes Day One a better application for me is the fact that I have the Mac application to use alongside the iOS applications for Day One. The tagging that you can do within SocialDiary is useful to help you categorise your postings and is also helpful when you’re searching.

Everyday.me is a blast from the past

I tweeted out that I was using the application Social Diary and a Twitter user came back to me with the recommendation that I look at an application called Everyday.me. I think that this is a better application than Social Diary, in fact this is the one that also has a fourth social network included, Foursquare. It also has a reminder in the form of a daily question which is sent out by email. The function that I do particularly like is the one called Blast from The Past. What’s this feature does is to pull in the social posts that you have made in the past in twitter etc and gives you a summary from one year ago, and maybe a couple of other years in the past. I quite often look at these and think ‘Goodness me, was I doing that then’.

The Everyday.me application also has good backup facilities as well as the ability to add tags to your posts. There is a section called stats and its gives you a few charts. Your mood, based upon the smileys you have used, a chart of interests which is based upon the tagged entries and there is also a pie chart to show you the frequency of your postings.

Hojoki is a similar, but then again different sort of beast

This application is more aimed towards collaboration and it has links into the sorts of things that app developers might use. It does also have a couple of social network connections which will be of use to us mere mortals. It will link into Evernote, Pocket, Trello and Twitter, plus a whole lot of others such as Dropbox and Skydrive, then some that I haven’t even heard of. This application also has a daily catch up and weekly stats which are sent out to you by email. Useful too, but not going to take over from Day One.

I have started using this application Moneywiz to take control of my finances, small as they are. I am finding it to be very useful to enter transactions and keep on top of the day-to-day looking after the pennies. It is easy to set up the application so that you can enter transactions with the minimum of fuss. You can set up a number of categories so that you can see where your money is going to. You can check the details of your financial life with a number of very good reporting facilities in the MoneyWiz apps.

Adding a transaction in Moneywiz

It is really easy to enter a transaction in Moneywiz, I am just using the iOS versions. I have the application on my iPad and also on my iPhone. While I am out and about doing whatever I’m doing, be that spending some money while shopping or if I am at someplace and receiving some money, I can enter those details into the Moneywiz application using my iPhone. It is very reassuring to know that once I get back home again and I open up the application on the iPad, or the Mac application if I had it, that the transaction will be there and nothing more needs to be done.

The reports is where it is at, in Moneywiz

In order to make sense of your financial situation you need to have some reports which will take your transactions that you have added willy-nilly and organise them somehow. Within Moneywiz you categorise your transactions with categories. So if you’re buying groceries then that will be categorised as a grocery or food and drink transaction. When you’re looking through the reports later to see how much money you’ve spent during the month, you can check the category for groceries in the reports section. You can take that one step further also by having a budget.

In the reports you can look at your net worth, trends, account balance, budget balance and there is a report which gives you all of the statistics for your account. You can generate a report which will give you a forecast for your money over the next amount of time that you decide, be that the next three months or the next half year. So there are lots of graphs and pie charts that you can look at to give you just about all of the information that you need. It is also possible to save the settings for a report, so that you can go back to it again later.

Budgeting your money in Moneywiz

If you want to make sure that you don’t spend too much money on certain things, then you can create a budget. You decide how much you want to spend, maximum for the month or quarter and see how the budget is faring There is a little indicator which shows you how far you are through your budget for the period. Also from this budget you can get through to any of the transactions to get down into the detail.

Scheduling of transactions in Moneywiz

There is a view that you can choose to look at to see your scheduled transactions. So when you know that you have payments that are due out at specific points during the month you can enter those. You can also enter any income you expect to receive. This can all help keep your money under control so that you don’t go into the position of entering an overdraft unnecessarily. An unauthorised overdraft at a bank will be expensive and therefore it is well worth to buy the application Moneywiz to make sure that you know exactly what is going to happen. All you need to do is to tap and hold down on a future date in the calendar and the application will give you a pop-up financial forecast for that day. It will tell you what the balance is expected to be and any incomes and expenses for that day.

The NoStylus and Mac20Q verdict on Moneywiz

Moneywiz is a very capable application that will most definitely help you look after your money. It is easy to use and gives you good information back in the form of the excellent reports. I have contacted the developers to ask about what to do in regard a refund situation and how to enter that into Moneywiz. They got back to me very, very quickly indeed to tell me that they are specifically adding a function in the next version to deal with money that has been refunded. They also gave me four options for dealing with this type of transaction with the application as it is at present. I would like the ability to add new categories at the time that I’m entering a transaction. At present the categories need to have been added beforehand in the settings. I paid full price to buy these applications, the iPad version and also the iPhone version and I am still happy with the purchase. I would certainly recommend Moneywiz to other iPad and iPhone users. The Mac application for Moneywiz is a good bit more expensive to buy. For the way that I’m using Moneywiz I’m quite happy to stay within iOS.