today i want to talk about my five favorite drawing apps that are completely free. and i'm not talking about asterix free where there's some catch later on or some try out. no, we're talking free. so if you're brand new looking to get started and use something awesome. or if you're looking for something to replace that monthly subscription. this is the place to start. i would like to thank today's sponsor, the dot site domain extension. they hooked me up with a brand new domain name. if you want to reach my site, all you have to do is type in brad.site. that's it. you don't have to remember my last name or anything. i'd like to thank them for the sponsorship. and if you'd like to learn more right now, there's more information down below in the description. until then, let's get on with the video. now the apps i'm going to talk about today. they're not in any particular order. it's just a list of things i like. first up is medibang. it's

available on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Pretty much everywhere you are, MediBang is there, creepily peeking around the corner. You may know MediBang from its other name, FireAlpaca. Yes, that is a real name. No, I am not making it up. MediBang is open source. I think FireAlpaca is a fork of the original. I'm really on shaky knowledge ground here right now, so let's leave it at this. They are pretty much identical. Cool thing about MediBang is if you ever ask yourself, I wonder if it could do this, the answer is usually yes, yes it can. MediBang is the most traditional app on this list. It's not doing anything fancy. It's not breaking any new ground. It's just a super competent drawing and painting application that works the way you expect it to work. If you're coming from an app like Photoshop or Clip Studio, it will feel very familiar to you, and I think this is a good thing. I haven't used MediBang for long stretches.

of time, but I still feel at home when I do use it. So it's not breaking any new ground or trying to be different. It's just doing what you'd expect it to do. It's like the Toyota Camry of painting programs. Not exciting, but it's good, it's reliable, and it makes sense. They've managed to pack a lot in this four-door sedan. There are features that you need and expect in an app like this. And though you could draw anything in this app, it's really geared towards comic and manga. And many of the features that they've added in here support those styles. There is a comic panel creator tool here that makes it quick and easy, and really kind of fun, to make comic panels. There's also comic page management, so if you're working on a book or a really long web comic, you can easily keep track of all your pages within the app. MediBang also has a cloud service, and I haven't used it much because I'm up to my ears in cloud

surfaces. As it is, I don't need another one, but they're doing some interesting things beyond just file saving here. They're also offering things like additional fonts and resources within the app. If you want a halftone dot pattern to go in your comic, go and download it. If you want some neat hatching effects, they've got you covered. You need more stars than you can shake a stick at, here you go. For a free app, minibang is pretty impressive. Next up is Sketchbook. Wait a minute, Sketchbook ain't free. Oh contraire, that's French for you're wrong or something. The Sketchbook went from an annual subscription plan to being straight up free almost two years ago, so I guess this probably isn't news to anyone. Sketchbook is available on Windows, Mac, Android, and the iPad. There are a lot of artists and illustrators out there who absolutely love Sketchbook. It's been around for a long time. There are a ton of features packed into this app. It's very touch-friendly, even if you're using

it on like a tablet PC, and it has a very minimalistic interface so everything gets out of your way when you're drawing. Got a lot of natural media brushes here, and a lot of them do really feel organic, or as organic as a painting program can get. I like how they even break down the brushes visually by the shape of the brush that you would be using if you were painting in real life. Most painting apps would just have a generic brush icon or show you what the line would look like, and both ways of visualizing brushes have their pros and cons. There's not a wrong way to do it, but I like this. I think if you're coming from traditional art and going into the digital space, especially early on, you're going to feel more at home seeing tools that you recognize and know. If you see just a bunch of dozen lines, you're not going to really understand how that line is created or what that tool is supposed to do for you. Sketchbook also packs in some grid and symmetry tools, some really

nice perspective tools and guidelines even distort and transform tools so you can shift something around on the perspective grid. There are a wide range of selection tools. I bring this up because it's not just for painting but also editing your artwork here as well. Sometimes you're drawing something in the head, it's just too dang big or something's just off. It can be easier to select and modify your sketch than to go back redraw the whole thing and realize you're never going to draw the nose right again. Not that i'm speaking from personal experience here. And there's more tools here too like dynamic gradient fills, the flipbook animation features, the shape drawing templates. Basically this is a pro level app and now it is free. One thing to note is after you've downloaded it, you will need to create an account in order to use the full version of the app. One thing that i notice is for whatever reason sketchbook is one of the more sensitive drawing tools out there. If you're not confident when putting down a line, it's gonna pick

that up. It's gonna pick up some of that jitter in your hand. Good news here is there is a line smoothing tool that is gonna help to offset that. Speaking from personal experience, there is a lot to love here, even though I've never a hundred percent gotten into some of the tools things like panning and zooming. It just does it differently than other painting applications. It takes time to get used to, but if you're willing to dedicate yourself to this app, that's a pretty easy thing to overcome and adapt to. That was the question parrot today's question. What about, okay, I deep breath brad. I don't like. I really don't like, and really isn't a design and illustration program. Well, I guess it kind of is. Basically, is designed to replace Photoshop. So, photo editing, drawing, painting, everything that you can do in Photoshop, is designed to replace. It was originally designed for Linux. Nothing wrong with that, but when it got ported over, what I've found is that it's laggy, it's slow, it's not native to the

mac where i tend to draw, and I think it gets mentioned a lot because it's free, and it does so many different things. But for me, I'm not a fan of the workflow, and I wish it was snappier. I wish I could use it faster. So unfortunately, not on this list. If you like it, if you love it, if your workflow works with, keep on keeping on, man. Next up is my paint. One thing to know about my paint is it has potential, lots and lots of potential. My paint is an open-source painting app that started on Linux but also runs on Windows and on Mac. You might have to do a little bit of work, especially if you want to get this to run on your Mac. I found installers for Windows, and I found a video on how to get it running on a Mac. It involves installing Xcode and Terminal. So I said, Hey, cool, thanks, but I'll leave this one to the Windows guys. And when you go to the my paint site, it's designed for developers, not consumers. That's because it's on

version two of its alpha. What's an alpha? Is the release that comes before beta so this is not ready for prime time yet which is why I talk about its potential but beyond these growing pains there is definitely something cool happening here. First of all, it has an infinite canvas. What the heck does that mean? In most drawing programs, the very first thing they ask you is, hey, what canvas size would you like to draw on? It makes sense but here you can keep sliding to the left or to the right or up and down as far as you want. So if you're sketching, you want your sketch to go further, you just pan over and you can do this endlessly forever or until you run out of RAM whichever comes first. It's a pretty cool feature. I've seen it in a couple other apps too but this is the first time I've seen something like this in a free app. Another cool feature that they've added in here is something called a scratch pad. It's like a tiny little canvas that you can practice on.

not sure how two colors look together when they're blended. Test it on the scratch pad. Wanna see what your brushes look like before you use it on the canvas? Test it on the scratch pad. A lot of people have recommended this to me, and I stumbled upon it recently because one of my favorite art YouTubers, Sarah Tepes, uses it. I hope I'm pronouncing her name right. So, this app has gotten a lot of attention within the art community, and I'm just curious to see where it goes. Next up is ibis Paint X. ibis Paint is a mobile-only painting app. It's available on Android and iOS. Now, I know I said these apps are asterisk-free, and this is the one app on here that I put an asterisk by because I'm a big fat liar who likes to lie. Also, I should point out you can use this app without ever paying anything. It's not going to time out or stop you from saving your files or some other trial-like restriction. Here's where the asterisk

comes in. You can upgrade, which will remove the ads along the top and will unlock the brushes. The reason I included this app here is one, it's good, and two, you can unlock those brushes just by viewing an ad. It says it will unlock the brushes for a quote period of time. It's not specific how long that period of time is, but it's at least a couple hours. I can confirm that. Also, one ad view unlocks everything. I'm also including ibes because out of this list of five apps that run on Android and iPads, this one is probably my favorite. Sketchbook is really good, but the hand gestures they slow me down a little bit. I'm not a fan of the three-finger swipe to undo. I like the two-finger tap. That's something that ibes has incorporated. I like this more than medibang because on tablets, it's a little bit more minimalistic and streamlined. Medibang has more stuff tucked away in there. That's not a bad thing. It's just a preference I have. Ibez

borrows a lot of features from procreate. I mentioned the two-finger tap to undo before, but there's also little things like tap to hold to grab a color. And I mentioned the unlocking of the brushes. There are a lot of brushes once you unlock them, and they're great for comics, cartooning, manga illustration. There's a lot here, and you will find something you like. And since it is designed for line art, there's also things like line stabilization, tapering at the end of strokes, really, really some cool tools. There are also some great shapes, rulers, things like that. There aren't any vector shapes, it's more like a template. You put down your template and you can use it to draw your shape, good stuff. Along with the comic-oriented brushes, there's screen tone textures for manga-style shading. These paints on just like any other brush, and there's 40 textures here to experiment with. I like to overlap textures to see how badly I can mess up my artwork, turns out I'm pretty good at that. Also like medibang, there's a comic

panel maker. These are just fun to play with. I usually draw boxes with my comics, but as soon as you start dragging the lines around and slicing things up with this comic panel creator, you start to think about the layout in a different way and what's actually possible. It's funny how the tools like this can start to expand your creativity. I would like to take a moment to talk about today's sponsor, the dot site domain extension. As an illustrator, you want to put your work in the best light. If it's your personal brand, a project you're working on, a business, you can use a dot site domain name. I did. I moved over from bradcobo.com to brad.site. So much easier to remember. Nobody's got to spell my last name. It's short, it's simple, it's sleek, and most importantly, it's super easy to remember. You too can build your brand on a dot site domain name. Just go to their site, search for your name or business, and if that's not cool enough, you can get a massive 50% discount on dot

site domain names. That is if you use the links down below and the code brad culvo. We gotta talk about Krita. It might be my favorite app on this list. I don't particularly like drawing on it with these small screen devices like the Surface Pro that you see me drawing on here in the background, and that's because it doesn't leave me a ton of drawing space. But when I have it on pretty much any other screen, it's really nice. Krita is a digital painting app available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's geared towards digital painting and visual effects, but it's versatile enough to be used for manga, comics, those sorts of things too. And you're gonna feel right at home no matter what you jump in to draw. The brush selection is pretty intense. There is a lot here, and a lot of these brushes are trying to recreate natural media. That's part of the appeal. There's a drop-down for sorting these sorts of things, which makes life a little bit easier if you're looking for just the right brush. There are pencils

pens for inking, lots of brushes with different textures, and also blending tools in your brushes. I personally don't need a ton of brushes; I stick with pretty basic stuff for my artwork. But for painters, people who love experimenting with this stuff, there is a lot to explore here. The one thing that I really liked here that I did not expect until I dove a little deeper were the animation features. I knew they were here, but I had no idea how good they were. They're basically frame-by-frame animation tools, but they're so well thought out. You've got your timeline, of course, and there's some nice onion skinning tools, and you can see the outline of your previous frame, that sort of thing. There's also an audio import feature. Altogether, the way it is streamlined with its shortcuts and ways of speeding up the process, I'm thinking I might have to do like a legit tutorial on this because as I was going through it, I was like, this is really good. And it's free. And as an added bonus, you get

to use all those great art brushes in your animations. Okay, I'm gonna stop gushing about animation now because credit has other tools and things that we gotta talk about too. Like click to erase, it's like a fill tool but for your eraser, and little things like it maps the eyedropper tool to the control key so it's easier to just grab colors on the fly. It's got shape assist tools, measuring tools. There's a lot more here, and they have a mascot. A mascot. I wish I had a mascot. No, I mean a good mascot. So those are the five I like. Let me know below which one you like the best, and also let me know did I miss one that's really good. Hit me up in the comments. Thank you guys for watching, and I'll see you in a couple of days. [Music]

5 Free (and Really Good) Drawing & Painting Apps

Welcome, this is an illustration channel focusing on tech, reviews and generally my journey to become a better illustrator.

For a list of my favorite drawing hardware check out my website http://bradsartschool.com

