Whether you’re a professional artist or a novice painter, before you can generate the your ideal canvas print, you must first create a work of art. With huge advances being made in technology, you no longer have to put a pen to paper to turn a blank canvas into a stunning scenery or the perfect portrait.

There is a wide range of software tools, accessories and apps for your Apple devices that will allow you to produce everything from doodles and drawings right through to full works of art. But which apps should you invest your money in? Here at Parrot Print, we’ve put together our top five illustration apps that are definitely worth downloading…

Adobe Color CC
The technology that was previously known as Adobe Kuler has come to the iPhone with a new app, the Adobe Color CC. This apps allows artists to capture colours using their iPhone camera and save them instantly as themes, which they’ll also find available in their other Adobe applications, such as; Illustrator CC and Photoshop CC. Whether you’re a professional photographer or you simply have a passion for it, this apps allows you to take everyday objects and transform them into art using different colours, shades, and tones. This app requires a internet connection and a Creative Cloud membership.

Taptrix Brushes
The Taptrik Brushes app is a free, full-screen painting app, which boasts an accelerated OpenGL-based painting engine and the ability to record and replay your paintings. Exclusively designed for iOS, the app has full support for Retina screens and offers 64-bit painting on the more recent iPhones. You’re able to create paintings with dimensions up to 2048x2048, and it has more than a dozen brush shapes and brush sizes up to 512x512 pixels. It allows you to move work between your Apple devices and offers an extensive layer-based capabilities, as well as colour controls.

Adobe Brush CC
Taking the Color CC that one step further, Adobe Brush allows you to turn any photo into a custom painting tool. With the app you’re able to zoom, crop, and mask your image to focus on any part of the photo you need to for your brush design. These brushes are automatically backed up and in sync with your Creative Cloud apps, so you can access them instantly in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch.

iColorama S
This photo editing app provides more than 500 brushes and extensive capabilities, with effects ranging from simple image adjustments to complicated transforms. The iColorama S has a sophisticated interface, which offers textures and painting presets. It allows has a wide range of tools, including; history, masks, text, and deformations. With this app you can also share your artwork instantly on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr.

Procreate Pocket
Procreate Pocket is a smartphone app version of the Procreate iPad app designed for mobile art creation. This app sports a 64—bit, 4K cinema canvas for iPhone users, with a 60 fps painting and 1080p video recording that records your brushstrokes. The Procreate boasts12 highly-designed brushes with up to 10 layers at 4096x1714 pixels and 18 layer blend modes to aid compositing. Professional tools, such as; Curves, HSB adjustment, Sharpen, and Gaussian Blur are at your fingertips, as well as specially tools, including; move, distort, shear, and ColourDrop. You can also access Airdrop and iCloud via this app for multiple file formats.

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