Hey all you lovely folks,

This is the first of my software recommendations posts, this one is talking about a free cross platform art application from the company Autodesk.

Free you say?

Free stuff is good right? Especially if it's creative software that's easy to use and powerful.

I spotted that Autodesk have released Sketchbook for free on all platforms including all premium features. Which is pretty cool as it's one of the better art applications on windows, android and iOS. It's continued to grow over the years.

It was the main app I used on my android devices for a few years, but over time I replaced sketchbook with a few other paid apps. I.e Procreate, Affinity photo/designer, layerpaint HD and Paintstorm studio. More on these in a later post.

Going back to sketchbook more recently it shows some great improvements and a few features that I'd love other apps to have. An art application of this calibre for free is quite astounding.

I'm not going to review this app in full here but I am recommending it as a great app to use. It works on mobile for "finger painting", or tablets with pressure enabled stylus pens and on pc,mac with wacom tablets.
Coupled with some great brushes, awesome guides, painting layers and intuitive to use.
Being free just increases my recommendation from nice to have to a no brainer.

Proof is in the pudding

The image below of my alien buddy known as Freddy, had been painted on my mobile a few years back. About 95% of it painted with Sketchbook mobile, with 6 layers and fingers only on my bus journey to work.
Some might ask how's that's possible. The answer is simply zooming in and using some nice brush options. The final 5% had been touched up on my new android tablet at the time that had a stylus.

Close up details, Use brushes to help detail where possible, sometimes it's just brute force approaches that works best. For example wrinkle details had been created using an additive layer and painting the highlights to the wrinkle one by one.

**Brushes are your friends, treat them nicely and they are nice back to you.
The skulls below is a crop in really to show how the painterly brushes worked well as an expressive medium.
Here I was simply doodling with the new synthetic brushes, introduced just after I finished the Freddy paining above.

These paintings are a few years old now but sketchbook has improved since I painted them and I was happy to pay for the app back then.

Let me know if in the comments what you think and if sketchbook or posts similar to this is helpful to you :)

Thanks for viewing

Cheers
Nick aka @niko3d

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