Late Night Software's Sketches app was the first and still best drawing app for the iPhone. Sketches sells for $5 and is worth every penny. Just draw with your finger. Finger too big? There's a zoom tool that helps. There are 24 pen colors plus eraser and a variable size pen. The slower you draw the smoother the line is. To undo tap the Undo button on the left or just shake your iPhone like an Etch-a-Sketch to undo all. There is also a Revert to Saved feature if you hold down the undo button.
There's a library of backgrounds and basic clip art you can use. You can import images from your photo albums and draw over top of them or use the camera while in the app. You also can take a screenshot of a web page or map (it can find your location) that you can mark up. If you double tap the screen, the controls go away and you can work full screen. And the Index is a cork board of thumbnails that you tap on to call up your image. As a matter of fact, the user guide is a series of images on your cork board. Check them out thoroughly before deleting so you don't miss any features. You can also reinstall these from Home/Settings/Sketches.
One of the coolest features that really shows off the power of the touch screen is shapes. Unpinch to draw the shape and size it. Without lifting your fingers, move them to place it or move them in a circular motion and you can turn most shapes. Pen size and color determines the shapes boundaries. And there are three fonts for the text field. Text can be placed, sized, and rotated as you like. You can export to Twitter, Web (view from any browser), email or an iPhone Album. Once in an iPhone Album it's available for as a contact photo, wallpaper, or to send to a MobileMe album. Examples of some of my stetches are on tumblr.
With 2.0's new ability to save images from email and Safari, you have even more options for images to draw on while mobile. Sketches is what an iPhone app should be.
Tips:
- If you use a basic drawing a lot, save it as an image and call it up when needed. For instance, I created a drawing of a ukulele fretboard that I keep in an album and can call up quickly to draw chord tabs on top of.
- I regularly post screenshots to the Web from my iPhone but they're big fat PNG files. Open them in Sketches and export them to an album and they're saved as leaner JPEGs.
- If you do a drawing without a photo for a background, Sketches orients it to portrait. I created a clean white image with the horizontal orientation tag. When I use it as a plain background and export, I get the drawing in Landscape mode for Web posting from my iPhone.
- Since the background is interchangeable at any time, you can trace over a photo of someone and then change the photo to a white background for easier portrait drawing.
- Save regularly when you're at a stage you are happy with. You can experiment and Revert to Saved by holding the Redo button.
- Change Pen size before changing the color. You won't have to call the pen window up twice.
