Top 10: Creative tasks with an iPad

2. Illustration and Design

While painting apps emulate the natural textures of brush strokes, illustration apps are all about clean lines and smooth graduations. This is one area where the iPad’s screen size and resolution does feel a bit too cramped. However, illustrations often include freehand lines, which the iPad handles far better than a computer mouse.

Drawing, like painting, can be fitted into any spare minutes you have in the day. If you’re just starting out then you can always import an image from the iPad 2’s built-in camera, and then draw over that to get the basic structure of the scene. Here are our top choices for illustration.

Adobe Ideas’ no-fuss approach to illustration make it a useful sketchpad

Adobe Ideas (£3.99) couldn’t be much simpler. There are options to adjust the colour and opacity of lines, but they’re freehand only – there’s no ability to amend them other than with the eraser. It can incorporate photos, though, and its ability to create a colour palette by analysing a photo is an interesting feature. We liked it better when it was free, but its simplicity is as much a strength as a weakness.

Inkpad (£5.49) is more in keeping with Windows illustration packages such as CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator. It’s extremely quick to use, with a simple set of vector drawing tools for freehand lines and basic shapes. Lines can also be drawn and edited using nodes and handles to fine-tune freehand lines and modify regular shapes. It also supports graduated fills, drop shadows and dashed lines, plus options to group, reorder and align objects. We particularly like its Eraser tool, which bites chunks out of existing shapes, and the ability to place text on a curved path.

The iPad is perhaps not the obvious choice for full-blown illustration, but Inkpad makes a good argument in its favour

iDraw (£5.99) is a little more sophisticated, with better editing of curves, various options to combine shapes and the ability to place a bitmap image inside a shape or text object. However, it wasn’t as responsive as Inkpad on the original iPad. We also found that the arrange and align options are harder to manage; it doesn’t support layers so selecting two or more specific objects but omitting others often proved tricky.