Realistic Paint Studio 4+

By accident I ran into this great drawing app. It does what it says. It’s a realistic drawing app. In every way. Even though it lacks some basic functionality like adjusting the canvas size, enhanced layer features, export functions (jpg is possible now) the power is in its paint engine. The water-, oil and pencil engine is really good. And that is what is of interest to me. There is lack of tweaking brushes but if you are an artist like me and don’t want to tweak brushes all day because the brushes you have at hand are good, then this is an app you really would like to try. I’ve tried all the other painting apps available on the ipad and there are definately apps that offer way more functionality. But... are you using all these options? Keep up the good work guys! 4 stars now until more basic functionality is added (hopefully next update) then definately 5 stars.

I love this program for it’s straight forward approach. No fiddling around settings, you need to work with what’s there. Interface is nice. The way the brushes work, often with ‘double’ functions, is pretty neat. Pencils are great, watercolors good, oil painting disappointing. There are a few issues that keep this program from being great:

A few bugs/issues:

The interface sometimes does not reflect tool changes when clicking the favorites.
Some brushes act unexpected, especially the color mixing. With more than 3-4 bright pencil colours you wind up with some kind of neon color.
Some graphical irregularities now and then, random pixels.
The canvas structure sometimes shows in the paint even when there is already a thick layer that covers the canvas.
A few missing features:

A simple airbrush. The thing is, the brushes get so slow on larger sizes (which is still pretty small relative to the canvas) that it takes forever to paint large areas. I get that this is compromise for the real behavior of the brushes, but there should be a workaround for larger areas.
Layers export (!)
Other minor things:

I would like to combine watercolor with oil paint.
Drips that follow the iPad orientation.
A bit more control over the canvas structure
The interface looks good, but some of it gets in the way after the novelty wears off. Switching tools gets tedious and you cannot remove oil paint tools from the favorites when in water painting mode and visa versa. Also I would like to be able to enlarge the layers panel.

VIP brushes are nice but some a bit gimmicky but my kids like m.

What bothers me most is the ‘color mixing’ bug. Firstly some bright colour end up with some kind of neon colour. But worse than that, the color of the canvas and even the wood (and grain) from the mixer palettes are mixed with the paint which is really annoying. The oil paint mixer palette is almost useless because of this. The oil palette could also be more intuitive. The water color mixer is a bit better but in that respect but I miss a way to reset the mixing reservoir to no paint. All in all the ‘realness’ concept has been pushed a little too far imo.

Let me be clear that I like this program and really enjoy drawing and painting in it for fun (I draw professionally but it’s not suited for that, neither is that it’s intention). But the mixing issue bugs me and should be fixed. I appreciate most of the limitations and they help me be creative and have fun. As long as you work around it’s limitations this app is great fun. If the color mixing is fixed and in if i can freely switch favorites in every mode I would rate this full stars.

I quite like the app but I'm really missing smudge brushes and or a transparent color