Realistic Paint Studio +4

The tools are easy to use, hard to master. You'll definitely need to put more work in to make your art look good compared to other programs like Procreate, but the results are beautiful. I'm sure I could go on and on about how pretty and neat the options are, but to be honest, you will want to just see for yourself, it's quite hard to explain in words. It just feels good.

That being said, this would be even better with stuff like layer mode options (for those who like to mix traditional coloring techniques with digital ones further). I didn't notice anything like that, I think it would be good to include! I also think some stuff like canvas tilting and the assignable shortcuts are a bit buggy/janky and don't always work as they should. I also think the special color algorithm needs some tweaking, as blending the primary colors doesn't seem to work entirely correctly for example.

Aside from that, future expansive categories of brushes, paid or not, would be wonderful to have as well! I would love to see stuff like gouache, acryllic paint, more inking pens, and maybe stuff like oil pastels? (I didn't see any of these things but it's possible I missed it, I did just get this program after all!) Either way, I hope that this will be semi-regularly maintained, updated, and improved, it's really good!

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.