Realistic Paint Studio 4+

Fresco is a premium paint simulation subscription with lackluster features for the monthly payments. Art Set 4 has frustratingly unsupported standards, with the most obvious example being the neglected integration of stylus features that are universal everywhere else. The lack of Palm rejection and stylus only modes, leaves you accidentally painting with your Palm. The frustration multiplies if you don't lift your hand right away and you end up choosing between undoing progress or fixing it manually. Art Rage has a digital feel to the final project, mostly due to the smooth strokes and overly accented light reflections. Paintstorm has occasional lag, most noticably in the experimental brushes. I think it was abandoned and never updated for performance optimization in newer devices. My only complaint with this studio is a bug where the engine processes the color of the wood as paint. You will inevitably mix in the Wood's fleshy tone into your color palette, but that is a minor annoyance and negligible. I bought this studio on a whim, and immediately upgraded with the premium pack IAP after playing with it for a half hour. I highly recommend.

Love the app, really enjoy it. (As far as I can tell) it doesn’t have as many of the usual “digital art” features like different blending modes for layers and stuff like that, but it does a very good job of simulating a traditional art feel, which is great if you want to feel like you’re using watercolors but don’t want to get messy or don’t have the space to get messy. (Or can’t, if you’re on a train or plane or whatever.)

One thing I wish it had: the ability to save custom colors to the sets of colors for different mediums. I find myself wishing I could mix a particular color pastel or watercolor and then save it to my “palette”, to be used in the future. There are a lot of different colors to begin with, but I find the color picker a little clunky to use (I”m used to H/S/B and R/G/B sliders from other digital art apps I guess.)

I also find that although the app will allow you to make canvases up to 5000 by 5000 pixels, it really can’t support that. None of the brushes scale up big enough to make a dent on the canvas (so enjoy painting by teeny tiny bits and taking hours to fill areas lol) and the app begins to lag horribly (running it on an iPad Pro, so shouldn’t be my device’s fault.) Would love to see that addressed as well.

I’m submitting a new review after having spent about three weeks using this app. It took me a while to learn where certain tools and options were hiding (select & transform tools, reference window, etc.), but I finally have it figured out. This app is simply amazing for painting and drawing. It is a pleasure to use. The oils look and feel great, the watercolors and paper textures are really nice, the pencils and pens look authentic, I can’t stop using it! No other app compares to this in realism of artist mediums. I’d love to see more paper options added to the custom canvas creation menu (like pastel boards, stained-looking, different color papers, etc.), larger canvas option for printing (bigger than 5,000x5,000 at higher dpi), the ability to move the color wheel and palettes around, and ability to export as a PSD file with layers. Keep up the great work! I would highly recommend this app to any digital artist looking for that realistic paint feel. Well worth the price. Looking forward to future updates and additions.