The iPad is a valuable tool for artists.  I often bring mine to the studio when I paint.  As a result, several of the women that I paint with own them too.  The iPad is great as a portable image library.  But it offers so much more than that.  I will do a few blog posts on the applications that I like best.

Today, I’m going to tell you about Penultimate, an app that I love for its simplicity.  Penultimate is a sketchbook application with a limited palette of colors and pen thicknesses.  It can be used for handwritten notes, but I like it for doodling.  It is not a painting program; its toolbox is limited.  This keeps things loose and free.  I draw with my finger, sometimes with my left hand.  I love the rawness of drawing with my non-dominant hand.  Often I draw in the dark, while waiting to sneak out of my 3-year-old son’s room at night.  Some doodles may turn into inspiration for a painting, but it’s also just play and discovery.  The images can be imported into other art programs and manipulated further. (Another blog post…)  I’m just starting to learn about digital art and I think that the iPad provides a very inviting way to explore some complex art programs.

If you have an iPad and haven’t explored its artistic side, I recommend checking out Penultimate.  It’s $0.99.  The pages look like a moleskin sketchbook.  (Cute!)  You can create multiple sketchbooks and they are very easy to flip through.  They’ve recently added a few features that I haven’t fully explored yet.  Such as, adding photos to a page, cutting and moving parts of your drawing, and new colors, including a yummy eggplant purple.

I took screenshots of some of my zillion doodles for you to see.  Normally when I export them, they appear just on a blank white background.  (Something to discuss with the guys at Penultimate.  It would be awesome if the exported image looked like a sketchbook page…)

P.S. The sketches with “L.H.” on them were done with my left hand.  I added color to the sketches at the bottom using Sketchbook Pro on the iPad.