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The tablet is a blank slate - Review ArtRage for Apple iPad

Posted by Kathleen Maher on July 1st 2011 | Discuss
Categories: Software Review
Tags: graphics review software ipad art

Steve Jobs is not always right and in fact, he was totally wrong when he dismissed the idea of a stylus for his devices because among all the other things the iPad does well — remote control, movie player, presentation platform, and best friend on a lonely Saturday night — the iPad is turning out to be a really great piece of paper. We have downloaded several drawing program for the iPad and every single one of them is good. Just the current list of drawing tools on my computer includes Brushes, by Steve Sprang: $7.99; Auto­desk SketchBook Pro: $4.99; Adobe Ideas: free.

There’s plenty more available out there and I’ll probably wind up getting many of them, such as the new Adobe Layers which accompanies Adobe Ideas. Each one of thsese programs has their attractions. For instance, Adobe Ideas is a vector program enabling users to bring their work from the iPad into Illustrator.

ArtRage, the latest product I’ve been working worth is, is much more of a paint program. It has become a favorite program among people who use Wacom tablets and it’s likely to become a favorite among artists using the iPad. It’s available for $6.99 and is loaded with options for different brushes, paints, inks, and papers. It allows you to save combinations for brush styles and papers.

ArtRage has a clean, simple interface. The bottom two corners of the page are used for options pickers: brushes on the left, colors on the right. You can just stab your stylus, or finger, down to pick up the tool you want and you can easily revert back to a previous choice. When not in use the options panels disappear, leaving a complete page for your work. The interface in no way slows you down rather, it really feels like painting. Well, if in painting it were easy to go from water color to oil to airbrush and mix them up.

Like most art programs on the iPad, Art­Rage has support for layers and you can use a photograph for tracing. It alos lets you “pin” a photo to the workspace if you’d rather use it as a reference. An especially nice feature, is the use of an eye dropper so you can grab colors from the original picture to use in your masterpiece. Unlike many of the competitors, ArtRage stands out for its support for unlimited layers and unlimited undos.

ArtRage is also painterly in that it can be hard to precisely control the way the paint behaves if you’re using some brushes like watercolors. This can be fun or frustrating, but the beauty of digital is that you can just undo when things get out of control.

Early reviews of the product point out that ArtRage can get overloaded as you build up your work with layers, paints, custom brushes etc. The response of paints can sometimes slowdown. Also ArtRage may warn you that it’s running out of memory and advise you to quit and restart. While, this is not a lot of fun when you’re in the zone and painting away, it’s preferable to losing work. In my personal experience, I did not find the problem to be any more pronounced than on some other programs, and I’m using the original iPad. The workflow should be smoother using an iPad 2.

One of the reasons I wanted to write about ArtRage is to talk about the revolutionary potential tablets are bringing to computing. Wacom started brought the idea to life with its Cintiq LCD drawing pads and the evolution of touch technology has brought the idea into the mainstream. Now, there are tablets. The tablet format does a good job of replacing the sketch book and with the ability of some programs to export your work to the computer for further refinement and to exchange formats for professional use, well, clearly the tablets have the potential to become professional graphics arts tools.

And this is where there is room for improvement. ArtRage enables users to transfer files to the ArtRage program on the computer for further work and it, in turn, allows work to be exported in the PSD format for Photoshop. It’s far from elegant. In comparison SketchBook Pro, which does not have the same breadth of tools, does save to PSD for more flexible transfer. And, of course, Adobe’s own tools are designed to enable interchange with Photoshop and Illustrator on the PC.

All these programs that are evolving for the iPad are evolving with different strengths. SketchBook Pro is a great drawing tool and it gives the user a feeling of percision. ArtRage is a nice complement with its great paint tools and options. It would be nice some day to have the ability to work on the same drawing in different tools and take advantage of the best in each. So far it looks like Adobe’s PSD format with its support for layers might emerge as a common platform, but for now, the paths to file exchange are tortured. Given the unwillingness of software companies to share access to their customers, and the iPad’s relative inflexibility when it comes to exchanging files, that situation will probably remain for a while. Here, I hasten to add that there are proably good reasons for Apple’s jealous maintenance of file access and that workarounds such as iDisk and Dropbox are evolving, but there is a ways to go. We wonder whether the eventual arrival of tablets from a variety of vendors and supporting Android and Windows platforms as well as Apple will help move progress along a little faster.

ArtRage, Ambient Design Ltd., Aukland, New Zealand.