The Apple iPad Pro has to be the best pro tablet out there. Does the tablet as computer make any sense? With the fantastic applications available on iOS, is it any wonder you can indeed use your tablet as a computer. Yesterday I downloaded an application called Painterly and I’m thoroughly impressed with what is possible with it. In some ways it is a little bit like the application PaintCan in that you can take photos and turn them into pieces of digital art. As with many of these best pro tablet applications for photography and digital iPad art, you get a range of filters you can apply. It’s not a huge range compared to other applications with filters, but they seem quite cool to use. You also get the Splash effect, which is where you turn a colour photo to black-and-white and then just paint on the areas where you want to have the colour applied. With that you have Free Colour and you colour in whichever colour you like. Then you have Smart Colour which I found to be really good to get the blue of a sky that had a tree in the foreground. The tree stayed as black and white while the sky was all turned into blue colour. There is much more to the app than that. It’s called Painterly for a reason – Paint images on to your digital canvas to make a collage and have plenty of brush controls to do a great job of it. A good app to use alongside iColorama.

Learning to use Painterly

There is a good quick reference guide which pops up when you first get started and which you can return to any time you wish. It gives you a quick six step guide to using the application.

1. Choose ground (canvas)
2. Select source image from photo library or capture using built-in camera.
3. Choose mode
4. Start painting
5. Apply enhancement filters to artwork
6. Save and share your work

As you follow the process through, you’ll also be changing the source and the opacity of it as you need it for your painting. You’ll be choosing your brush patterns, configuring the brushstroke settings and selecting the filters and blend mode.

Within this informational/learning area you’ll also find tutorials and videos to help you get up and running. As with a lot of these iPad drawing and painting applications it’s good to experiment and play. You always have the undo button, so you can’t completely destroy your work. Sometimes things will work and sometimes they won’t. Your creative goal is to make choices and decisions about your image as you go. As you get more familiar with how any of these applications work you’re able to work faster and know which tools are best to use. There will always be a mixture of deliberation, deciding beforehand what you want and how you going to do it, mixed in with a certain amount of serendipity. That’s the joy of creativity!

Starting a Painterly project

In the top right corner there is a small icon that looks like a canvas on a tripod or easel. Tap on this to get a list of 15 types of background to use for your drawing. There is quite a range from the Dark Grey Canvas to the Bright White Rag Paper. You may also choose from your Photo Library to have one of your photos as a background. It is a two tap process to choose your image when I think only one tap should be needed. Then it brings you into a window where you adjust the image before using it in Painterly. Here you change lighting, colour, sharpness as well as draw on it if you wish. The drawing capabilities are not very good, but the blemish removal tool works very nicely indeed. The white tool doesn’t appear to do very much, while the focus tool gives you a choice of a radial or a linear focus that does what it is supposed to. You may also add text if you wish and crop or change the orientation of your image. The next thing to do is to add another image over the top of your desired background, whether that is the textured effects or whether you have used one of your images from your photo library.

Move it where you want it

You bring in the image you want to work with by using the plus symbol in the top left corner. You get the chance to enhance the image before you finally start working with it. At the top middle of the screen there is the word Compose which shows you, that at this point you can move the image around screen, resizing and turning it, to get it exactly where you want it. Make all the adjustments to get the picture in the right place, tap on the word Compose and then choose Paint. Use the Apple Pencil or whatever stylus you use to draw over the image to painted onto your canvas. You may need to adjust the opacity of your source so you can see it better. Wherever you paint using your Apple Pencil on the best pro tablet for artists you will get your source image appearing on the screen. I’m finding that there is a certain amount of lag, and more so when the brush is larger and the problem is not due to the Apple Pencil. I tested other styli and I just got the same amount of lag. To see what your image is looking like you’ll see there is an icon looking like a pair of spectacles in the bottom menu, tap on this to get a full-screen view of your work. In the settings for the brush you can choose from 66 different brush shapes and you may also choose the size and opacity. There is another setting area for the brush in the left pop-up menu called Stroke. In this setting you can change the shape and size of the brush with more finesse. You can tell it to randomise the scale of the brush as well as choose the rotation of the brush shape. There is a switch on there to have a brush cursor and I think that is best left on, so you can see where it is you are painting. If you have chosen to randomise the shape and size of the brush you will see the oval of the cursor changing as you move it across the screen.

Creative ways of using Painterly

The application is really very good if you want to make a collage from various images. Just set your background and then bring in the images one at a time to paint them in. You have enough control with the brush despite its lag to get images positioned correctly. Painterly is useful where you’d like to overlay a texture on top of a photo or painting. You can set the Render with two filter positions and a blend mode. You will get different effects by changing the settings for the brush and you can change these effects as you go.

Careful using the eraser mode

There doesn’t seem to be a way to protect an area you have already completed. Because of this you need to be careful if you are having a second session of painting a source into your canvas. If it’s right next to something else you have already drawn and you go over you might think you can erase. You can erase, but it is likely you also remove parts of your previous drawing. It is a pain to have to reset up the image again to redo an edge you’ve rubbed out. The first option is, to take caution and be careful when drawing next to areas you have been working on. The second option would be to save your painting you’ve done so far to the camera roll and bring it back in again as a new starting point background.

Overview of Painterly On the Best Pro Tablet

Painterly is a useful application to have in your artist toolbox on the iPad Pro. When in use with the Apple Pencil you’ll find it’s easy-to-use your tablet as computer. When brushing with a larger brush it can be a little bit laggy. It is still usable despite this and it is when you’re using a smaller brush that you really do need to have it more accurate. I’m hoping that this is a part of the application that will improve over time. Painterly is great for making a collage of images. You see a reduced opacity of the image you want in your painting on the screen and you paint it in. There is a lot of room within the application for iPad art creativity and I can thoroughly recommend it.

I have been looking at a number of art applications for the iPad . I started with the application Procreate which I found to be good application for drawing with. We also looked at the application ArtStudio which has more tools and is the one that is probably my current favourite. Then there is also the application ArtRage which is more painterly in its approach, to the extent that you can mix colours on your virtual canvas. This application Ink Artist is more suitable for drawing as it has a number of line styles that you can use. These lifestyles are adjustable with opacity, size and the pressure to give you different types of creative and expressive lines.

Using application Ink Artist for iPad

I have been looking at a number of art applications for the iPad. I started with the application Procreate which I found to be good application for drawing with. We also looked at the application ArtStudio which has more tools and is the one that is probably my current favourite. Then there is also the application ArtRage which is more painterly in its approach, to the extent that you can mix colours on your virtual canvas. This application Ink Artist is more suitable for drawing as it has a number of line styles that you can use. These lifestyles are adjustable with opacity, size and the pressure to give you different types of creative and expressive lines.

In the past I have been an art student at art college and I have stretched canvas and daubed paint in a creative way. These days I like my art to be digital, because I think it is great the way that you can create an image on an iPad and you don’t have to worry about cleaning brushes, the smell of the oil paint, having to wait for paint to dry and so on. The immediacy of being able to create an image on a digital canvas is absolutely fantastic and now with this application for the iPad called ArtRage we have something that really is like virtually painting.

Loading up your brush with paint

Within this application you are not just choosing a colour, you’re adding paint to a digital brush. When you move your brush across the digital canvas the paint will be spread by the paintbrush and will look just like the paint would in real life. The paint is real and not a never-ending stroke of colour, the paintbrush will only be able to put a certain amount of paint into the image. The paint will tail off as it gets used up by the paint stroke. Then you can load at the brush again, maybe with a different colour and mix the two lots of paint on your digital canvas with your digital brush. You will get similar results to what you would get if you had a real artists paint brush loaded up with paint. It is just that it is without the hassle of having to clean out brushes as you work on your painting.

Choices that you make for your digital painting

You can choose the surface that you want to paint on. You can have something that would resemble the surface that you get with watercolour paper, or you could have something that would be like canvas that you would use for either acrylics, or for oil paint. There is an infinite range of types and styles of media that you can draw and paint on within ArtRage. Just the same as you can make choices about the surface that you’re going to paint on, you have a huge range of tools that you can use to apply your colour.

Digital painting is better than the old analogue way of doing it

The speed with which you can make your decisions and choices is fantastic for an artist. If you need to quickly change from one type of brush to another, load it up with paint and start painting, then you can do that with ease. You don’t have to wait for layers of paint to dry in order to be able to paint the next part of your image. You can even choose whether you want to have the digital paint to be either wet or have it dry to achieve effects that wouldn’t be possible in the old-fashioned way.

With ArtRage you can use layers that will allow you to work on the background without disturbing or destroying something that you might have already worked on in the foreground of your design. It is still necessary to plan how you want your overall design to work out on your digital space, but you can at least work at it from a number of different angles. So you could work on an important part of your design that is in the foreground and then add a layer underneath that, to be able to add the background. Try to do that with paint on canvas and you would be spending much more time and energy in the creation process. Go and make a masterpiece with your iPad today.

Yes you can do a Garageband download – No to Garageband for PC

It may seem a little bit strange to us Mac users, or to us iPad users that have legitimate use of the application Garageband, but large numbers of people online do a search looking for Garageband for PC or Garageband for Windows. There must be a a ton of people that have heard about the great fun you can have and the excellent music that you can create by using Garageband. You have the possibilities of using the Magic Garageband which assists you in a lot of ways to help you make your bit of music. You can take the next approach which will be to use the loops that come with Garageband for the Mac and for the iPad and craft your own piece of music. Then of course if you are a proper musician and you just need to do a quick recording of yourself with your guitar or your keyboard that you play yourself and add a number of tracks together to do something that’s a little bit or professional, then Garageband is just the job. I love the way that you get the image of a stage with some instruments on to waiting to be played, you choose what you want and build your song. Great for kids to start making music, Garageband Digital Audio Recorder might even get them on the path of learning a musical instrument.

Garageband download – where do you get it?

When you buy a new Mac it comes with some excellent pieces of software that you do want to use. Not like when you buy a crappy PC and you get a bucket load of what can only be described as rubbish software, that is really only fit for the bin. With the Mac you get the iLife suite of software and included within that is Garageband. Without a doubt a new user to the Mac, in the first few days will have many hours of fun making music tracks. It’s all part of being a Mac user. Apple knows this, which is why we are given such a good selection of software with the computer when we buy it. It is to encourage new users to the platform.

Share your Garageband music

Naturally once you have created your musical masterpiece you’re going to want to share it out, so that other people can listen to it. It is easy to do that by exporting the song out into your iTunes library, you even have the choice of going for the CD quality format or saving out as an MP3. You can even take your song and turn it into a custom ringtone for your iPhone. How good is that? You will hear your song every time your friends call you.

Despite the fact that Garageband for Mac is so good and much better than anything that you would get on a PC, there may come a time when you want to upgrade to the professional musicians software Logic Pro. It is easy to bring in songs from Garageband into the Logic Pro software.

Garageband will also give you basic music lessons

You won’t get music lessons on an equivalent Garageband for PC. With the Garageband format you will get 40 lessons to choose from. With Garageband for iPad, you can use the iRig MIDI to plug in a keyboard, there is also a device, Amplitube for iPad, you can use to allow you to connect a guitar to your iPad. Then you can have Sting teach you how to play Roxanne. You can also use the iRig microphone to sing along to your newly learned song. Using Garageband is a great way to learn the chords and finger positions for the guitar. With the lessons you can also play along with the band as well as hear some of the stories behind the song, directly from the musician that created it in the first place.

Stop dreaming about Garageband for Windows

So if you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll hero and you can’t afford a Mac, don’t waste your time wondering about Garageband for Windows, just go and grab yourself an iPad. Garageband for iPad only costs $4.99 and you are in business to start creating some music.