Sketch Pro: Draw & Create Art

Review by eFreeware

Sketch Pro is a drawing and painting app for phones and tablets from 4Axis Technologies, listed under Art & Design and pitched at people who make anime and manga art. It is free to install, carries no ads, and offers in-app purchases. The reason I would give it a look is the range: customizable brushes, an unlimited-layer canvas and a stack of AI-assisted tools sit in the same app, which is more than most free drawing tools attempt.

It is aimed at creative professionals such as graphic designers, illustrators and comic, anime and manga artists, but nothing about the toolkit reads as closed to beginners. A hobbyist who draws characters on a tablet would find the same brushes and layers. The developer also says the app has been updated with AI tools meant to speed up a working artist's process, and that is the part that separates it from a straightforward paint program.

It has been installed over a million times and holds a 4.6 average from more than 32,000 ratings, which suggests a settled audience rather than a novelty. The app arrived in December 2023 and was last updated in September 2026, so the project is still being worked on.

Brushes, layers and the mechanics of drawing

The core of the app is a brush engine. There is a range of brushes for sketching, painting, doodling and illustrating, and they can be customized rather than used as fixed presets. A favorites list keeps the ones you return to within reach, and a roller brush ships with more than a hundred patterns for filling areas or building texture quickly.

Underneath that sits a layer system that does not cap how many layers you can use. Layers can be rasterized, duplicated and merged, and there are also options for filling, inverting colors, locking alpha and locking a layer. For anyone who has built up an illustration in stages, those are the controls that decide whether an app is workable, and their presence here is the strongest argument for the app's professional framing.

The supporting tools cover the small jobs that interrupt drawing. Smart Shapes draws geometric forms instantly, a symmetry tool mirrors strokes for designs that need to be even, and a gradient tool offers linear and radial fills. A layer transform tool and assisted drawing round out the set. A smudge tool, a solid-color fill bucket, a cutter and a custom canvas handle the rest, and a reference tool keeps an image on the canvas for when you are working from something.

Text is handled separately, with customizable font styles for lettering and design work. Colors come from a full wheel with adjustable values and shades, and you can build themed palettes or pull colors out of a photo. A shapes library adds more than fifteen categories of shapes, signs and symbols, with a favorites list of its own.

The AI tools and what they change

The AI features are the most distinctive part of the app, and they cover a lot of ground. Text to Image generates artwork from a written prompt, while Sketch to Image turns a hand-drawn sketch into a finished image, again from a prompt. Magic Edit is for revising what you already have: recoloring, changing textures, and adding or replacing objects through prompts.

Two of the tools are aimed at the tedious parts of illustration. Auto-Coloring and Auto-Colorization add color to sketches in seconds, either automatically or guided by color hints you supply. Object Remove and background removal take elements out of a drawing, and a line art tool extracts line work from any image so it can be used in your own drawings. Expanding the canvas is handled by an AI tool that fills new space with matching content at custom dimensions; the developer claims this happens without a drop in quality, which is the kind of promise worth testing against your own artwork rather than taking on faith.

How much these matter depends on how you work. An artist who sketches by hand and wants a fast route to a colored image has obvious uses for the conversion and coloring tools. Someone who draws entirely from scratch may only reach for object removal and canvas expansion. Either way, the AI features are additions to a normal drawing app rather than a replacement for one, and the manual brush and layer tools remain the foundation.

Saving, syncing and keeping a body of work

Drawings save automatically. Projects are stored in an organized way and can be deleted whenever you want, which matters once a sketchbook fills up with abandoned attempts. Cloud syncing keeps drawings available across devices.

Time lapse playback plays back a drawing. A dark mode is included for anyone who draws at night or prefers a muted interface around their canvas. The most recent update was limited to bug fixes and performance improvements, so there is nothing new to learn if you already know the app.

What to expect when you first open it

Sketch Pro runs on phones as well as tablets, and the developer describes it as made for both. That is worth keeping in mind before you commit to it as your main drawing tool, since a canvas app behaves very differently depending on screen size. The feature set is broad enough that a phone user will not run out of tools, though the more intricate work is naturally easier on a larger display.

The app is free to download and supported by in-app purchases, and there are no ads. The free install is a chance to see whether the brushes and layers suit you before deciding anything further. The app is rated for Everyone.

Because the toolkit is large, the first sessions are likely to be spent finding your way around rather than finishing a piece. Brushes need customizing, the layer options need learning, and the AI tools each take a little experimentation before the results match what you had in mind. That is normal for a full drawing app, and it is the trade-off for having this much in one place.

The artists this suits

The clearest fit is someone drawing anime, manga or comics on a touchscreen who wants brushes, layers and color control in one app without paying upfront. Graphic designers, illustrators and comic artists are named as the intended audience, and the layer options and shape library back that up. If your work involves inking, flatting and coloring characters, the toolset lines up with those stages.

It also suits artists curious about AI assistance but not ready to build a workflow around it. The conversion, coloring and cleanup tools sit alongside the manual ones, so they can be used for a single stubborn step rather than the whole drawing. Someone who wants to sketch a rough, hand it to the coloring tool and then refine the result by hand has a plausible path here.

Hobbyists who draw for pleasure rather than work are not excluded by any of this. The app is rated for Everyone, the brush set covers doodling and scribbling as well as finished illustration, and the reference tool is a help for anyone drawing from a photo. What the app asks in return is patience with a large toolkit and a willingness to work on a screen.

A free canvas with a serious toolkit

Sketch Pro is worth installing if you draw on a phone or tablet and want a broad set of brushes, layers and color tools without paying to find out whether they suit you. The 4.6 average from a large body of ratings suggests the app has found its audience.

The caveats are the ones that come with any large toolkit. In-app purchases are present, and the AI tools are the kind of feature that rewards experimentation rather than a quick tap. Canvas work on a phone is a compromise next to a tablet. None of that is unusual, and none of it undercuts a free install.

My recommendation is straightforward: install it, spend a few sessions with the brushes and layers, and judge the AI tools on your own drawings rather than on the promise attached to them. If you illustrate characters, design graphics or simply draw for fun on a touchscreen, this is a reasonable place to do it.

What's new in version 2.1.1

Bug fixes and performance improvements.