As tablets have advanced, many artists are turning to the best Android tablets and best Android phones as their weapon of choice for making digital artworks. The key to that is a great app to express yourself. With so many out there, how do you choose the right one? This roundup will help you narrow down the choices by sharing some of the best drawing apps available for your Android device.
The criteria
These are the important features and factors to look out for when choosing a drawing app:
- Pressure responsiveness
- A wide range of brushes and tools
- Being able to customize brushes or create your own
- Being able to work with multiple layers
- Layer blending modes such as multiply, overlay, color dodge, and burn
- Touch gestures and keyboard shortcuts
- Built-in time-lapse recording is a plus
The price of an app will often be a deciding factor, too, especially if you are a beginner and just getting started. Each app here is either free, partially free, or gives you a decent trial period of the full version, so you can test each one and find the one that works best for you.
In case you’re wondering, these apps were tested on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite. It still holds up as a competent tablet for digital art and is a great value for money.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into the apps.
Sketchbook
Originally developed by Autodesk, Sketchbook has become a popular choice for many. It has a clean, uncluttered, and easy-to-navigate interface. If this is your preferred app on your computer, you’ll be right at home using it on your mobile device.
Pros:
- Great pressure responsiveness
- A huge assortment of brushes that can be customized
- An easy-to-find time-lapse capture feature
- A useful complementary color indicator
- Symmetry and perspective tools
- A reasonable maximum layer count (10 layers for 6000x4500px canvases)
Cons:
- Limited touch gestures
- DPI (dots per inch) is fixed (usually at 72 DPI)
Price: 100% free.
Screenshots of the Sketchbook app and tools on Android
Infinite Painter
If you’re looking for something that gives a similar drawing experience and feature packet as the iPad painting powerhouse Procreate, then check out what Infinite Painter has to offer. It has a great selection of tools and textured brushes that emulate traditional media. So for the painters among you, this is recommended as one of the best drawing apps for Android.
Pros:
- A wide range of brushes
- Advanced brush engine for customizing and creating brushes
- Color with gradient maps
- Lasso fill tool
- Touch gestures
- Time-lapse capture
- Brushes can interact realistically with an added paper texture
- PSD support
- High-resolution canvases
Cons:
- Lack of keyboard shortcuts (but not needed for this app)
- No text tools
Price: $10, but there’s a 7-day free full-access trial.
Screenshots of brushes and settings in the Infinite Painter app.
Clip Studio Paint
Clip Studio Paint is packed with features and has quickly become a popular alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop on PC. It has a fair price for such an advanced piece of software and is a great option for comic creators and animators as well.
On tablets, you’ll get the full package too. It’s versatile in how it can be used with touch gestures, keyboard support, and a nifty companion mode for paired smartphones.
Pros:
- Comic layout and panel tools
- Great pressure and tilt recognition
- Huge online asset library
- Perspective tools
- Multiple layers and blend modes
- Touch gestures and keyboard support
- Cross-platform cloud storage
- Animation capabilities
- S Pen air actions support
- Companion mode to pair a phone with a tablet or PC
Cons:
- The busy interface that might be intimidating for newbies (but it has plenty of official tutorials to guide you and an active community adding more of their own)
Price: $1/month for phone, $5/month for tablet version, or one hour free each day.
You can get a 6-month free full-feature trial from the Galaxy Store.
Screenshots of tools and brushes for Clip Studio Paint on Android.
MediBang
MediBang is another popular free drawing app, particularly for new comic artists. Like Clip Studio Paint, it has a large asset library to pull from. You can back up your work on the cloud and access it on your computer later as well. The mobile version is a little different from the desktop release. It’s better adapted for small screens but still packed with tools.
Pros:
- Touch gestures, including double-tap to undo
- Large online asset library
- Comic panel and layout tools
- Good pressure recognition
- Works on canvases at 300 DPI
- Time-lapse capture
- Customize display shortcuts for the floating panel
Cons:
- No keyboard support
- Pressure sensitivity isn’t active by default after installing
Price: Free with ads. Starting at $3/month, you gain additional features, increased cloud storage, and an ad-free experience.
Various brushes and settings for the MediBang drawing and painting app.
Ibis Paint X
Ibis Paint, like MediBang, targets manga and anime drawing enthusiasts. It’s a little heavy on the advertising, though. The tablet and phone versions are much the same, except that the side toolbar is packed away on the phone app.
Pros:
- Wide range of brushes
- Brushes are customizable
- Unlimited layers
- Layer blending modes
- Time-lapse recording
- Lasso fill tool
- Liquify tool
- Navigator/reference window
Cons:
- A bit too much advertising compared to similar free apps
Price: Free with ads. $10 for the remove ads add-on. $3/month for Prime membership, 20GB of cloud storage, and added tools.
Krita
Free, open-source, and rich in features, Krita is a well-loved digital art app. Designed primarily for computers, it’s been ported over to Android, as is, in its entirety for tablet users. As such, it’s better suited to working with a keyboard connected, allowing you to activate and switch between tools with keyboard shortcuts rather than touch gestures. It works as you’d expect from the desktop version and is also available for ChromeOS users.
Pros:
- Plenty of features and tools
- Good brush engines
- Supports most file types, including PSD
- Animation tools
- Unlimited undo
- Keyboard shortcut support
- S Pen gesture support
Cons:
- A bit cramped on smaller screens
- Can easily make unwanted marks with the side of your hand
Price: 100% free.
Screenshots of the Krita interface and settings on Android
ArtFlow
ArtFlow is another great app that doesn’t immediately bombard you with features in a busy interface. For that reason, it’s one worth recommending for beginners and hobbyists. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s lacking the tools more advanced users will enjoy.
Pros:
- Time-lapse recording
- Multiple layers
- Layer blend modes
- Uncluttered and straightforward interface
- Decent max canvas size at 300 DPI (13 layers at 6000x4500px)
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Flip the interface layout with left- or right-handed mode
- The full version is temporarily activated by watching an ad
Cons:
- Limited layer count in the free version
- Limited touch gestures beyond pinch to zoom
- Experienced a few crashes while testing
Price: Free, $6 one-off payment for the Pro version.
Screenshots of the ArtFlow app on Android
Concepts
There aren’t many decent drawing apps that offer an infinite canvas. That makes Concepts a great app for generating ideas and spreading them over a single page. Think mind-mapping where Pinterest meets your actual sketchbook, so you can insert images, draw around them and make notes. With its full Copic Color Wheel, it feels like this was made with designers in mind.
Pros:
- An infinite canvas
- Import images from your gallery or browser
- Full Copic color palettes
- Funky exploding color wheel
- Vector drawing
- Cross-platform subscription
- Various purchase options to suit your needs
- Customizable touch gestures
Cons:
- Limited layer count in the free version
- No layer blending modes
- Can’t customize brushes
- No time-lapse recording
Price: Free, $5/month full-feature subscription, $16 one-off for the Essentials pack, various other one-off purchase options.
Screenshots of the Concepts app on Android.
Notable mention: Magma.com
Do you want to collaborate on drawings with your friends? Launched at LightBox Expo in 2019, Magma (formerly Magma Studio) is a browser-based drawing app and collaboration tool rather than a downloadable one. As such, you don’t get the range of tools that you would with something like Clip Studio Paint yet, but Magma has something else that’s quite unique: the shared canvas. You can host a canvas and invite your friends from all over the world to draw on it with you and share ideas.
Pros:
- Shared canvas for up to 30 people
- Great for drawing jams when paired with Discord
- Built-in chat window
- Browser-based so any device can access it
- Some touch gestures (pinch to zoom, rotate, pan, two-finger undo)
Cons:
- Only the basic brushes (round, square, hard, soft) on the free version
- Limited to only accessing canvases that have been active in the last 30 days
Price: Free. The $10/month Pro version gets you added features like textured brushes, lasso fill tools, larger canvas options, and 5GB of cloud storage.
Screenshots of browser-based drawing app, Magma Studio.
Final recommendations
While it may be nice to have one piece of software that can do it all, you may find that one app does some things better than another. It’s not uncommon for artists to incorporate more than one app into their workflow and bounce between them on a single project. So be sure to test out a few apps to see which best suit your needs and works best for the device you are using.
Personal favorite: Infinite Painter
Infinite Painter gives the closest user experience to Procreate on the iPad and feels equally powerful. Its minimal interface makes it a great option for both phones and tablets.
Best for tablets: Clip Studio Paint
Clip Studio Paint is packed with features and a loaded interface, so it’s better suited for the larger screens on tablets and Chromebooks. You’ll be comfortable using this as a straight fingers-and-pen app, but you can also connect a keyboard and have at it just like you would on a desktop computer.
Best for phones: ArtFlow
ArtFlow’s interface is wonderfully minimal, giving you the option to completely hide all the toolbars and have the full-screen area to focus on your drawing. A double-tap to undo gesture is all that’s missing here.
Android coming for your creativity
Often when people ask about finding a standalone device for digital art, it’s the iPad with Procreate that gets recommended. There’s a good reason for that. Its neat and intuitive design makes it accessible to beginners while having a ton of advanced features packed in for more skilled users.
It isn’t the only option, and we’re excited by what’s available for Android. Samsung’s Galaxy S-series tablets with the included S-Pen, in particular, have become strong competitors. Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional, there are some great apps available for you to produce high-quality work.
