Top 10: Creative tasks with an iPad

1. Painting

Many of us carry our iPads with us regularly, so next time you’ve got a few minutes to spare why not try and paint something, such as the scene in front of you, or maybe just a single object. It makes a more creative change from the usual choice of reading materials and games we use to fill our time.

Painting on an iPad isn’t any better than the real thing, but it is more convenient. There’s no need to buy paint, wash brushes or lug an easel around the countryside. If this convinces people who haven’t touched a paint brush since school to get back into the habit, then that can only be a good thing.

Digital painting does have advantages beyond the practical, though. An Undo button is incredibly useful, and so too is the ability to duplicate a painting – just the thing for making a copy before applying some more daring final flourishes. Most painting apps support layers, which makes it easy to manage different elements. The iPad’s 10in screen can feel a little cramped but the ability to zoom in is another useful trick that traditional painting can’t match.

Procreate is one of the simpler painting apps around, but its brushes are deceptively sophisticated

Our favourite painting app is Procreate (£2.99). On the surface it’s pretty simple, with a choice of Brush, Smudge and Eraser, plus sliders to set its size and opacity. The smudge tool makes it easy to blend colours for some natural-looking paint effects. However, Procreate’s real power is the ability to choose from a variety of brush types and to edit them in meticulous detail. Options such as Grain Movement, Scatter and Wetness give a huge range of brush-like textures. It’s extremely responsive on the original iPad, while those with an iPad 2 can benefit from a larger canvas size, up from 960×704 to 1,920×1,408 pixels.

Another painting app we really like is Brushes – iPad Edition (£5.49). Its brush options aren’t as sophisticated as Procreate’s but it gets around the iPad’s lack of pressure sensitivity by making quick brush strokes appear thinner or fainter than slow strokes. The app can also play a stroke-by-stroke animation of the painting process – great for revelling in your finest artistic moments.

ArtRage (£4.99) is the most sophisticated painting app around. There’s a choice of 13 media types ranging from oil and watercolour to airbrush and felt pen. Picking one doesn’t just affect the texture of brush strokes – with the oil brush, for example, wet paint mixes together on the canvas and you can choose whether to clean the brush between strokes.

ArtRage is the closest the iPad comes to working with real paint

It can take a while to get to grips with its controls, especially as each media type has a different set of parameters, but there’s a range of templates to ease the learning process. ArtRage does prove a bit of a struggle for the original iPad, however, sometimes complaining of insufficient memory and reacting lethargically to brush strokes.

STYLUS OVER SUBSTANCE

Digital finger-painting is a vast improvement over painting with a mouse, but the downside is that your finger obscures your view of the canvas. That’s why it’s worth investing a stylus.

The Griffin Stylus (£9 from www.play.com) has a silky smooth rubber nib and works superbly – not just for painting apps but a wide variety of tasks. However, the stylus that really stands out for painting is the Nomad Brush ($24 from www.nomadbrush.com). It’s superbly weighted and its fibrous tip glides effortlessly across the screen. The iPad isn’t sensitive enough to detect the individual hairs of the brush so creating brush-like textures is still down to the app, but the Nomad Brush adds a great deal to the authenticity of the virtual painting experience.

A stylus feels more natural than painting with a finger, and gives a clearer view of the screen

Children will relish the idea of painting with an iPad, but it’s hard for them to avoid resting another part of their hand on the screen – in most apps, doing so switches from painting to zooming the canvas. The Griffin iMarker (around £20) uses a chunky, battery powered stylus that sends a signal to the iPad, and the accompanying Crayola ColorStudio HD app responds to this stylus and not to stray fingers.

Colour in with the iMarker and the picture starts moving

The app includes a range of brushes, pens and crayons, and lets children colour in animated drawings and design their own animations to colour in from a library of stock illustrations. There’s also a freestyle painting mode. It’s well executed, but the iMarker requires a bit of pressure for it to register. That makes it easier to avoid mistakes but it may confuse younger children. Then again, once the app has been unlocked with the iMarker, there’s still the option to operate it with a finger.