Essential drawing app for Mac
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
Download Latest Version for Mac (39.23 MB) Advertisement. If you’re looking for an accomplished vector graphics editor, Sketch may be your answer. It was first released in late 2010 by Dutch company Bohemian Coding. Since then it has enjoyed popularity and success, winning the Apple Design Award in 2012. May 29, 2020 Read on to discover some of the best free drawing apps for Mac that you must check out in 2020! The modern-day and age has allowed for people to discover, create, and share their art online. Many people have also taken this up professionally, and their livelihood depends on it all.
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
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.
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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!
What sketching app is the best one for Mac users? In this review, we’ll try to give an answer to this question. Taking into account the fact that the modern software market is overwhelmed with various features for designers, editors, architects, engineers or other representatives of art professions, it is really hard to select the most worthy app. Today, we’ll analyze the most reputable and well-liked sketching applications for Mac users.
1. Tayasui Sketches.
This is a number one sketch drawing app on our list. This is the most life-like, sketching solution, created for mobile devices. It has a user-friendly interface and dozens of great features. You can use it, aiming to create amazing sketches, bright illustrations or extraordinary paintings in seconds flat.
If you are a high achiever, you’ll definitely be satisfied with the choice of tools, allowing you to create cool artistic reproductions. All digital painting tools offered by this program are the most realistic ones. Its watercolor brush allows you to blend several colors, creating natural and stunning effects. If your primary objective is to create complicated drawings, the option ”Unlimited Layers” will help you do this. This application is also endowed with a big choice of acrylic brushes, various patterns, gradients, etc.
In a similar vein, Tayasui Sketches has everything you need for making your cool designs on the go. The application also allows you to share the results of your creativeness with other users.
2. Adobe Photoshop CC.
This app is not for newbies because to start editing images in Photoshop, you need to study some guidelines, showing how to do this, but a high-quality result is guaranteed. The application provides users with more than 1000 brushes, allowing them to apply different effects to their photos (the latest version comprises brushes developed by Kylie Webster).
Users can also determine the smoothness of all brushes they use by themselves. This is a professional software product, allowing you to bring your fascinating ideas into life. It is not free (the price is $ 9.99 per month), but if you used to work in the area of design on a daily basis, this is a must-have tool for you.
3. Paint Brush.
This is another simple application for those who wish to make interesting illustrations on Mac. If you have ever used Paint on Windows, you’ll notice that the functionality of Paint Brush is almost the same. This application enables users to make simple illustrations in a matter of seconds. You won’t draw masterpieces in it, but if you need to create simple, congratulatory cards avoiding the necessity to understand how to use one or another tool, Paint Brush is an ideal option!
4. Draw Berry.
This is a vector drawing application, developed for Mac OS X. The application is absolutely free but has several useful tools for making high-quality illustrations and sketching. Though this software solution doesn’t occupy the leading positions, it is regarded to be an excellent tool for those, who want to improve their skills in Vector Drawing.
5. Rebelle 2.1
This software product is for those painters who prefer watercolors more than other ones, allowing them to add a realistic and natural look to everything they draw in it.
Rebelle is endowed with a plethora of custom brushes, canvases, watercolor strokes, water sliders, brush renders and other important tools, allowing you to create a digital masterpiece.
The latest version of this application was enhanced and allows you to work considerably faster. Otherwise stated, if you wish to feel like Michelangelo, this application permits you to do this (but in a digital format).
It is not cheap – $89.99, but there is a free demo version. You can download it for free and test some of its options in order to make sure whether this software product can comply with your demands.
Sketch App Mac Free Trial
These five applications are deemed to be the most successful software products for designers or those users who need reliable resources for making presentations, illustrations or other digital masterpieces. It is hard to determine which one is better because each app mentioned in this review has slightly different purposes. You can test all of them and identify the most convenient option for you.