Scribble from Zintin is an art app reminiscent of MacPaint (though with even less functionality than that classic bitmap-based painting application released a quarter-century ago).
Essential drawing app for Mac
OmniGraffle Pro. Unlike SmartDraw OmniGraffle is a desktop diagramming software for Mac which can be used for all kinds of diagramming on Mac including flowcharts. For those that prefer a native desktop flowchart app for Mac over web based apps, OmniGraffle is definitely one of the best diagramming apps for Mac out there. Patina ® is the highest rated Microsoft ® Paint replacement app in the Mac App Store. Patina is great for a wide variety of work and personal needs, including sketching an idea, drawing a diagram, illustrating a concept, or painting a picture.
Macs have always been known as creative machines for creative people. It's likely the reason you actually bought one! So naturally Macs offer a wide variety of opportunities for you to express yourself, whether that’s building apps, writing prose, or drawing.
Having a good drawing app for Mac is priceless. Retina screens, accurate touchpads, and native support for a variety of inputs make sketching on Mac a pleasure. But with so many drawing programs to choose from, how do you pick the right one? Welcome to the no-sweat guide to the best free drawing software for Mac!
Best drawing, design, and editing apps
With Setapp, you don’t have to choose only one — get a large choice of the best drawing software to support your creativity flow.
The Best Drawing Programs On Mac Today
It's not easy to pinpoint the best drawing app for Mac. Is it one of the free drawing programs? Is it made for simple drawings or lets you paint on Mac beautifully? The level of skill has to be considered as well.
The collection of drawing apps below features something that appeals to everyone, from the Mac equivalent of Paint you can find on Windows to a simple drawing pad for Mac to the likes of Sketch software that can be used by professional designers too.
Communicate with the markup feature in Preview
If you just want to do a rough sketch for Mac or a few simple drawings, you don't necessarily need to go about downloading lots of drawing apps, you can just use a drawing app for Mac you've already got — Preview.
While most of us think of Preview as an image or PDF viewer, it's also packs a basic toolset for annotating, drawing, and sketching. To see what you can do with Preview:
- Open an image, document, or just a white sheet in Preview
- Click Show Markup Toolbar in its top menu
- From here you can choose tools, shapes, colors, thickness, type, and more to make necessary adjustments or create something completely new
- Save and share your image
For those who don’t intend to draw complicated scenes, Preview might just might be enough. For everyone else, there are, of course, more powerful third-party apps.
Get nostalgic with Paintbrush
Lots of us remember the simplicity and versatility of Microsoft Paint. Macs used to have a similar app too called MacPaint (that’s been discontinued). Well, good news is some enthusiastic developers took the matter into their own hands and essentially recreated a Paint app for Mac — Paintbrush.
This Mac equivalent of Paint will strike you as a complete duplicate of that old software you used to love. It features all the same tools, including rectangular and oval shapes, paint bucket, pencil, spray, lines, etc. You can also easily switch and add colors to your palette as you go.
Make professional mockups with Sketch
If you’ve already outgrown simple drawings you can do with Preview and Paintbrush, and want to move higher — try Sketch.
Sketch took the world by storm just a few years ago, when they essentially introduced a viable alternative to complex apps like Adobe Illustrator and targeted it specifically to digital design professionals.
Everything you do in the Sketch program is done in vector, which means all shapes are infinitely resizable, in contrast to the raster graphics of Paintbrush. With Sketch for Mac, you can design high-fidelity mockups for your website, prototype your iOS app, or just create complex illustrations.
You can download and try the Sketch software for free, but after a month, you'll be required to pay the annual license fee, which is a big downside if you don’t plan to use the app regularly. In addition, Sketch for Mac is not the most accessible app for beginners and it’s not exactly a drawing app for Mac due to its vector nature.
Create digital art with MediBang Paint Pro
Perhaps an equivalent of Sketch, but in raster graphics, is MediBang Paint Pro. This drawing software for Mac allows you to execute your dreams beautifully with over 50 custom brushes as well as its extensive support for layers and fonts.
Originally developed for comic creators, MediBang Paint Pro got quickly adopted by everyone looking for a versatile drawing pad for Mac and is hailed by many as the best free drawing software around. However, since it was built for the purpose of creating comics, you might face a few problems adapting it to your needs — it’s definitely one quirky drawing app for Mac. Another issue is the app’s slow update release cycle. So far, it’s been unavailable to macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur users due to the lack of security updates from the developers. This means you can only use MediBang Paint Pro on macOS 10.13 or older.
Set your imagination free with Tayasui Sketches
Talking about the best drawing programs, it’s simply impossible to avoid Tayasui Sketches. This intuitive sketch program is universally loved by painters, designers, illustrators, and art aficionados alike.
Ultimate drawing app for Mac
Draw on your Mac’s screen like on canvas with Tayasui Sketches. Mix colors and experiment with limitless layers!
Tayasui Sketches makes it easy to bring what you have in mind to reality with its support for unlimited layers, infinite undos, smart rules, and a wide variety of drawing tools. If you want to paint on Mac, nothing else comes close to representing the physical experience of applying colors to paper than this drawing software for Mac.
To start your drawing pad for Mac with Tayasui Sketches:
- Open a new document
- Try out all the different tools from the sidebar, from a fine pen to an airbrush
- Use supporting menus to modify your currently selected tool and mix just the right color
With just a bit of practice, you’ll see why Tayasui Sketches beats all the free drawing programs out there. Time for your digital painting skills to skyrocket!
Save all the cool colors with Sip
Regardless of the drawing software for Mac you choose to use in the end, one of the most difficult things to do is going to be finding the right colors out there. Sometimes, you might come across a beautiful color you might use in the future, but where do you save it? Sip.
Sip is the most intuitive, handy, and non-intrusive palette organizer available for Mac. This little utility lives in your Mac’s menu bar, where it saves all the colors you like and simultaneously features a tiny color picker on the side of your screen, which makes Sip instantly available in any sketch program for Mac, like Tayasui Sketches, for example.
By now, you should be well-equipped to start on your Mac drawing journey, using the selection of the drawing software for Mac listed above, whether it’s a simple annotation or a large-scale digital painting.
Best of all, you can try Tayasui Sketches and Sip for free by signing up for a free seven-day trial on Setapp, a platform for more than 200 unique creative Mac apps that literally help you bring your dreams to reality. Why wait, check it out now!
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
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Getting your art out there has never been easier than it is today. Just a few decades ago, people needed sophisticated tools and other expensive methods to show others their creative talent. Digital platforms have revolutionized this landscape and a lot of artists are getting recognized every day. However, if you’re looking for drawing apps for Mac, you can find a ton of options and it can be a little overwhelming.
In this article, we are going to streamline that list so that you can choose the best drawing app for you. Let’s jump into it.
Contents
- 1 Top 10 Best Drawing Apps for Mac:
Top 10 Best Drawing Apps for Mac:
We have compiled a list of 8 best drawing apps for Mac that you can get today. The list is ranked based on which app we think is the best, but you can choose whichever app suits your art style.
1. Adobe Photoshop
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What can I say about Adobe Photoshop that hasn’t been said already? Photoshop has been around for a long time and it gets new updates every year. It’s one of the most sophisticated drawing apps for Mac and will be a lot of help for a creator. You can create your own image and also edit other images to your liking. This software has a lot of love and support all over the world and it’s easy to understand why. There are a lot of videos online that’s going to help you learn Photoshop and there’s a large online community who’d be happy to help you. The newest version, Photoshop 2020, has an AI called Adobe Sensei that will help you get better selections.
Photoshop is great, but it is expensive. You will have to pay a subscription fee of $20.99/month if billed annually and you can do so here. So if you’re new to the creator scene, then I’d recommend checking out other entries.
2. Autodesk Sketchbook
If you want a professional drawing app with a lot of bells and whistles and if you want it for free, then Autodesk Sketchbook is for you. This app is so versatile and feature-rich that it will appeal to a lot of people. It has a minimalistic design and is preferred by a lot of content creators. There are over 140 brushes and you can even import brushes created by other artists. You can also get custom perspective guides among other things.
You can check out more features and download the app by clicking on this link.
3. Corel Painter
Corel Painter is an app that’s designed by creators for creators. It has a wide variety of tools you can use to propel your art to the next level. With over 900 brushes, this app is loved by many artists. Corel Painter also supports GPU acceleration so that you can get your work done much faster. Their website has hundreds of videos that will help you perform better.
Corel Painter costs $339.99 and there’s no subscription. You can download the app here.
4. Rebelle 3
If you are into realistic painting, then you will find Rebelle 3 appealing. It’s a unique app that uses realistic watercolor, acrylic paint simulations. The resulting image will look like it was made on paper with real colors and if this suits your art style, then you should definitely go for it. It makes the colors seem extremely realistic and you can even get simulated watercolor drops. This app was supposed to be an experimental software designed by Peter Blaškovič and it is popular among watercolor painters and CG artists.
You can check out Rebelle 3 and its features on its website. You can get Rebelle 3 for $89.99.
5. FireAlpaca
If you are new to digital drawing or if you have older Macs, then FireAlpaca should be a nice fit for you. It doesn’t have as many features as the earlier entries on the list, but that’s why it’s recommended to beginners. You won’t find the options overwhelming and you can worry about getting a more powerful Mac later on. It’s a small app that’s simple, easy and free to use.
You can check out the feature list of FireAlpaca on their website.
6. Preview
Scribble App For Mac
Preview comes pre-installed on a Mac and it can do much more than sign PDFs. If you want a simple drawing app for random doodles, the Preview should be good enough. You can open up any image on Preview and click on the Markup icon (pictured above) to access a lot more menus. It can help you doodle, make notes and even select shapes with the lasso tool. Since this is an in-built app, you don’t have to download anything.
7. Clip Studio Paint
If your dream is to become the best mangaka on Za Warudo!(means “the world” for all of my readers who are not JoJo fans), then you deserve a great manga illustrator. Clip Studio Paint is highly recommended if you draw a lot of manga panels. You can decide panel layouts and customize the tools for your art style pretty quickly. This drawing app for Mac also works great if you want to draw comics.
Clip Studio Paint is available for the free trial and you can get the standard version for $49.99. You can get the full-featured version for $219.99.
8. MediBang Paint
MediBang Paint, just like Clip Studio Paint is aimed at anime and comic-book artists. It has over 50 brushes and a large number of backgrounds that you can choose from. They have tons of tutorials for you on their website and you can snap grids and arrange the panels easily. This app is also available on iPhones and iPads. Medibang Paint is available for free and you can download it here.
9. Inkscape
Inkscape is an app that will appeal to a wide variety of creative people. It can help you create anything from sketches to website designs. It’s a versatile app that’s open-source and free to use. Inkscape also has a very helpful community that will help you use the app.
You can download Inkscape for free by clicking on this link.
10. Patina
Scribble App Windows
Patina is another simple app that lets you create sketches to your heart’s content and simply moves everything else out of the way. It has a simple layout and it’s extremely simple to use. you can use it to make a lot of sketches and doodles on other images too. Patina has a lot of essential features but misses out on stuff like multiple layers. This app is, however, perfect for beginner artists.
Patina is a free app available on the App Store and you can download here.
List of 19 Drawing Software For Macbook
Here is the total list of top Drawing tools and Apps for your Macbook.
- Adobe Photoshop
- Autodesk Sketchbook
- Corel Painter
- Rebelle 3
- FireAlpaca
- Preview
- Clip Studio Paint
- MediBang Paint
- Inkscape
- Patina
- Adobe Illustrator
- Leonardo
- Affinity Designer
- Krita
- Tayasui Sketches
- Paintbrush
- Tayasui Sketches
- Sketch
- Sip
Final Take
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These are some of the best drawing apps for Mac. I hope that this article was helpful to you. If you have any doubts or if we missed your favorite app, then please let us know in the comments section down below and we will get back to you as soon as we can.