Infinite Painter +4

Honestly one of the best painting apps I’ve ever used. The brushes are easy to use and feel amazing to draw and paint with, and creating new brushes is simple and easy. I can draw and paint in several different styles, from extremely graphic design to impressionist painting with ease, which I haven’t been able to do with any other art apps. The filters are easy to use, and the effect layers, like gradient maps, are amazing and something I can’t do without as an illustrator.

HOWEVER, there are a few bugs I’ve found that make it impossible to give it five stars. Sometimes when making a new layer in a project with multiple layers and folder groupings, the new layer will randomly disable other layers, seemingly for no reason I can figure out, and turning the layers on and off does nothing to help, and the only way to work around it is to keep painting on layers that are already there and hope for the best. I haven’t yet found a quick fix for this.

Every time I resize my canvas, I can’t draw again without the app crashing, and closing and reopening the app, the project, etc, does nothing to help. The only way around this is to duplicate the project and start working on the duplicated copy, deleting the original afterward. While duplicating the project does allow me to continue working, it absolutely interrupts the artistic flow, and every time it happens, I’m terrified that duplicating the project won’t work and I’ve lost hours or even days of work.

Infinite Painter is one of the best art apps available out there and for those with a focus on painting, will most likely meet your needs. The brush engine is impressive, delivering realistic and fast strokes with fairly robust and granular controls. It comes equipped with really useful tools to help you out in desigin-related creation for precise and realistic rendering. UI is simple and easy to use, allowing you to access tools and controls quickly for a smooth workflow.

However, it takes some exploration to learn how to use all this, and this is Infinite Painter’s greatest weakness. There’s little to no guidance on how exactly to use this app. Sure, basic things are explained to you, but those things are intuitive anyways. So many things are just never discussed. Pinning tools, canvas manipulation, deeper brush controls/parameters, all this stuff has to be discovered through trial and error. I’ve flipped the canvas vertically before and couldn’t find a way to turn it back over. Took forever to get it back and it happened by accident. Occurred a few times before I figured out what I was doing.

I certainly hope this continues to be developed out because as of right now, it’s a great tool but needs to be pushed further to become truly excellent. Learning materials, more explanatory UI, and greater apple pencil integration would really take this a long way. Still, it’s a powerful tool as is.

I love this app and use it WAAAY more than ibis paint but I would use it all the time if there was a mirror tool, basically meaning that if you draw on one side it copies the opposite way on the opposite side. When I am making heads, body’s, etc it is hard to equalize it on both sides. That’s when I go to ibis paint. Compared to ibis paint, this app has a much simpler setup and is easy to use, especially with a stylus or Apple Pencil. I can understand why the developer(s) wouldn’t incorporate this feature in since this app is trying to make it as organic as physical art. Another thing is it’d be nice to have 4 layers instead of 3, because 3 layers can only fit the outline, the skin, and the clothing, but with 4 you could also fit hair and hats. What I don’t like about some of the reviews that are low star is that when for example, they say they are being kicked from the app or cannot draw, but they also say the have a new device, that usually means they have a new device, but it is not a very good device. I would say 5/5 if it weren’t for the layers situation. I honestly can understand the mirror feature, but the layer limit is a little annoying sometimes.