Drawing Apps: Draw, Sketch Pad

Review by eFreeware

Most drawing apps on Android ask you to pick a lane. Drawing Apps takes the opposite approach: it splits the canvas into five separate pads, each with its own tools and its own idea of what drawing is for. There is a Sketch Pad for layered work, a Kids Pad, a Coloring Pad built around color-by-number pages, a Photo Pad for drawing over imported images, and a Doodle Pad for quick, loose marks. That structure is the most distinctive thing about it, and it is the reason the app can plausibly serve a parent, a bored commuter and a hobbyist sketcher at the same time.

The app is free to install, carries no ads, and offers in-app purchases. It has been downloaded more than 10 million times and holds a 4.1 average across 13,317 ratings, which suggests a large and broadly satisfied audience rather than a niche following. If you want one place to sketch, color, trace a photo or hand your child something to scribble on, this is the pitch.

A wide net, cast deliberately

The five-pad layout tells you a lot about who this is built for. The Sketch Pad assumes someone who wants layers and a serious brush set. The Kids Pad assumes a child who just wants to fill shapes with color and watch a glow pen work. The Coloring Pad assumes someone who would rather complete a picture than start one. The Photo Pad assumes someone who wants to trace or annotate an image. The Doodle Pad assumes someone who wants a blank surface and a few brush sizes and nothing else.

That range is the app's main argument. A dedicated sketching tool would give you deeper control over a single kind of work; a coloring app would give you a tidier coloring experience. Drawing Apps instead gives you a bit of each, and the trade-off is that no single pad is likely to be the most specialized option available for its particular job.

In practice I would expect this to appeal most to people who draw occasionally and want variety without juggling several installs, and to parents who want one app that a child can use alongside them. If your drawing is concentrated in one discipline and you want the deepest possible toolset for it, the breadth here works against you rather than for you.

Sketch Pad: layers and a serious brush list

The Sketch Pad is the most fully equipped of the five. It supports multiple layers, which is the feature that separates a sketching tool from a doodling one, and it comes with tools named for the traditional media they imitate: pencil, crayons, pen, watercolor brush, fill bucket and roller. If you have drawn with pen and pencil and want the digital version to feel familiar, that list is aimed at you.

Across the app there are more than 40 brushes, and the collection goes beyond the basics into chalk, fountain pen, marker, tattoo ink, pattern brushes and glow brushes. That is a large palette for a free app, and the variety is the kind of thing that keeps casual drawing interesting: the same sketch rendered in chalk and in marker will read very differently.

The canvas itself is configurable. You can choose from preset sizes including 7-inch tablet, landscape, portrait, square, large postcard and sizes labeled for iPad and iPad Pro, which is an odd touch on Android but harmless. Presets matter more than they sound: starting a drawing at the wrong proportions is a common reason a sketch gets abandoned halfway.

Coloring, kids and doodling

The Coloring Pad is built around a color palette and a library of more than 500 coloring pages covering animals, alphabet, numbers and fruits. That library is the reason the app can keep a child occupied for a long stretch, and the subject range is broad enough that adults who enjoy coloring will find something too. A recent update added smart coloring that keeps fills inside the lines, which addresses the single most common frustration with digital coloring.

The Kids Pad takes a different angle: color fill, painting tools, drawing for children, a glow pen and paint by number. It is designed for children who want immediate results rather than control. The Doodle Pad is the simplest of the five, a plain surface with adjustable brush sizes and strokes for quick marks and loose ideas.

In the Photo Pad you bring in an image and sketch over it using several brushes. The developer pitches this as a way for kids, beginners and experienced artists to learn by tracing, and that is a reasonable use for it, though tracing is a training exercise rather than a finished workflow. The same pad handles text: you can place a quote or a greeting over a photo with a solid, gradient or transparent background, which turns it into a simple card maker as much as a drawing tool.

Ruler, shapes and the new AR mode

Two tools deserve their own mention because they solve specific problems. The ruler draws straight lines and supports line art, where repeated strokes build light and dark areas; the developer describes it as useful for fast sketching and for gradients. The shape tool produces a straight line, circle, square, rectangle or oval without you having to steady your hand, and each shape can be filled or left as an outline.

The most recent update adds AR drawing. The camera turns into a see-through canvas, so your drawing and the real world show together, with adjustable transparency and saved progress. The developer frames it as a way to trace real objects and use them as references. It is the most technically ambitious feature in the app, and the one I would treat with the most curiosity, since camera-based tracing depends heavily on how steady your hand and your phone are.

Elsewhere the app covers the practical side: it works offline and online, artwork can be shared to friends and family from inside the app, and notes in your own handwriting can be saved for later. Support is handled by email, with the developer promising a reply within 24 hours.

Free, with no ads and optional purchases

Drawing Apps is free to download. It carries no ads, which is unusual for a drawing app of this size, and it does offer in-app purchases. I would treat the purchases as something you may encounter rather than something you can plan around.

The absence of advertising is worth weighing against the purchase option. A free app with no ads has to support itself somehow. Whether that ends up mattering to you depends entirely on how you use the app.

What is clear is that the install itself costs nothing, which makes trying the five pads a low-risk exercise. If the Sketch Pad and the Coloring Pad turn out to be the two you actually use, you will have a good sense of the app's value before spending anything.

How it compares with more focused tools

The obvious alternative is a dedicated sketching app built around one canvas and a deep toolset. That kind of app will usually give you more control over brushes, blending and layer behavior than a five-pad package can, because all of its development effort goes into one place. If your drawing is serious and consistent, that depth is worth more than breadth.

At the other end, a coloring app built purely around color-by-number pages will typically have a larger and better organized page library and a simpler interface for that single task. Drawing Apps offers 500-plus pages, which is a healthy number, but a specialist will usually go further.

Then there is the photo-editing side. A general photo editor handles text overlays and annotations with more precision than a drawing app that added them as a secondary feature. Drawing Apps is a drawing tool first, and the photo and text features are there to round it out rather than to compete with dedicated editors.

The case for this app is therefore not that it beats specialists at anything. It is that it replaces several of them with one free install, and that the five pads are different enough from each other to justify the arrangement.

A broad studio for casual drawing

Drawing Apps is best understood as a general-purpose art app rather than a specialist tool. The five-pad structure gives it unusual range for a free download: layered sketching, a large coloring library, a child-friendly mode, photo tracing and a simple doodle surface, all with more than 40 brushes and a set of canvas presets behind them. The ruler, shapes and the new camera-based AR tracing round out a feature list that is generous for the price.

The trade-offs are the ones that come with breadth. Each pad is shallower than a dedicated app for the same job. Neither of those is a reason to avoid it, but both are worth knowing before you commit your drawing time to it.

I would point this at people who draw for fun and want variety, at parents who want one app that works for them and for their children, and at anyone curious about tracing a photo or a real object through the camera. If you draw every day and want the deepest possible toolset for a single medium, a focused sketching app will serve you better. For everyone else, the breadth here is the point.

What's new in version 1.9.5

• AR Drawing: Use your camera as a transparent canvas • Trace Real Objects: Draw over anything you see through your camera • Real-time View: See your drawing and reality together • Perfect for References: Trace photos and objects easily • Adjustable Transparency: Control camera view • Save Progress: Continue your AR drawings later Previous Updates: • Smart Kids Coloring: Perfect coloring within borders • Advanced Zoom: Detailed work and coloring • Save & Share: Keep your artwork