Infinite Painter shines as Android’s pro painting app
The iPad and Procreate tend to come to mind when people think of digital art. But what if you’ve picked up one of thebest Android tabletson the market, eager to create your next masterpiece on that? One painting app for Android that stands out above the rest is Infinite Painter. It gives a high-quality drawing experience with a minimalist interface that makes it easy for beginners to use. For advanced users though, there’s a wealth of tools that make this a complete painting studio.
Intuitive user interface
Two toolbars are visible when you open a new canvas. The main floating toolbar controls your drawing tools. Here is where you can access all the different brushes, change the paint color, and adjust the opacity and size of the brush.
The other toolbar, fixed to the top of the screen, has four buttons. Two of them open up the different tool sets. One button opens up your layers panel, and the last one handles importing and exporting files, opening up your settings, etc.
Customize your workspace
Infinite Painter gives you a little room to tweak its minimalist workspace. You can do this by dragging your most-used tools out from the tools panels and pinning them to the top bar. This particular feature is only for tablets.
On both the tablet and phone versions of the app, you may dock the color wheel and color palette as well. This makes for much quicker color-switching while you paint, instead of having to tap to open the wheel each time. There are six different color wheel styles to choose from if you aren’t into the default one.
Wide range of brushes
Infinite Painter offers an assortment of brushes organized into different categories. Many of them mimic real brushes and paint to make your work look and feel more like a traditional painting. There’s also different pencils, chalks, and charcoals for drawing, along with a community library of user-created brushes.
Fills are an exceptionally helpful tools. Commonly known as lasso tools, Fills add color to an image as you draw shapes with them — no paint bucket required.
Like Procreate, there is a powerful brush editor built into the app. It can be a daunting feature for beginners to experiment with, but it’s designed in a very easy-to-use way. You can change different settings like the brush shape, its texture, and how it mixes with paint that’s already on the canvas.
Guides and perspective grids
Infinite Painter helps to draw things with an accurate perspective by providing a few different types of grids. There’s the option of one, two, and three-point-perspective grids, as well as a curvilinear grid. If you enjoy creating isometric graphics and environments, there’s a grid for that too.
Once you’ve chosen a grid and set the parameters, the lines you draw will follow those of the grid. You can toggle off the snapping if you want to use those lines only as a guide and not follow them exactly. With a grid active, selecting one of the shape tools will let you draw clean circles and rectangles that follow the perspective.
Navigator window
The Navigator panel is a floating window that lets you find your way around a zoomed-in canvas with ease. It maintains a 100% view of the artwork so that you can still see how it’s affected while you are painting details. When zoomed in, a red box appears in the window around the corresponding area of the canvas that’s visible on the screen. There’s the option to switch this window to black and white as well.
Color with gradient maps
Infinite Painter is one of the very few mobile painting apps with a gradient map feature. It’s a quick way to change the colors of an image, or to add color to a grayscale image.
First, you select the colors for the highlights, midtones, and shadows. The app then creates a gradient from this as a new layer and applies it over your image. It matches up the light levels (or values) in your painting to those selected colors.
Importing reference images
The app lets you import images as either a new layer or as reference images to your workspace. Importing as a reference means that images will sit above your canvas instead of pasting them onto it. You can add more than one picture too, making it like a floating Pinterest board. Each image can be scaled, moved, and even flipped — all without affecting the canvas. A new button appears in the top right that brings down a panel for controlling which images are visible.
As the name suggests, Infinite Painter is more suited to painting and drawing, and the brush sets do a good job of imitating traditional media. It lacks certain tools that comic creators might want though, like text and speech bubbles. For that, you’ll want to look into Clip Studio Paint.
There areother digital drawing appsout there that are free. Some will have fewer features, but they may be better options for the casual doodler. For others, Infinite Painter is an elaborate mobile art studio for your tablet.
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