Sketchbook Pro Revisted

Since my last blog about the Android app, Sketchbook Pro, there have been massive revisions. The app has been totally redesigned. Now it has about 97 brushes and the UI has been changed. Sketchbook Pro still has the floating brush bar, but now you can tap on the menu option and the brush menu will pop out. To pick the color, you tap on the color circle and the color palette pops out. There is also a floating color and brush puck that you can tap on to pop out the same brush and color menus. On this floating puck, pressing on the brush option and sliding to the left or right changes the brush size. Sliding up and down changes the opacity. If you press on the color option and slide up or down it changes the brightness of the color and sliding left or right changes the saturation.

The new tool bar has guides, gradients, a transform tool, symmetry tools, shape tools, a text tool, and a time lapse recording tool. There is a floating layers palette with 18 blending modes and cut, copy, and duplicate functions. You can drag your favorite brushes on to the brush shortcut bar. 

This is a completely new version of Sketchbook Pro and you have to download it again. You can download the basic version for free and you have to buy all the new brushes and tools. The cost is $4.99 or you can subscribe to their desktop version (they no longer offer perpetual licenses for the desktop version) and get all the tools for Android or IOS included in your subscription bundle. The subscription for the desktop version is $29.99 a year.

Overall, I really like the changes to the new Sketchbook Pro Android app and I am especially glad that they added the blending brushes and the time lapse function. 

This is the new UI of Sketchbook Pro for Android.

The new brushes include Synthetic brushes, Smudge brushes, Fine Art Pencils. There are also the Basic, Texture, Shape, Splatter, and Halftone brushes. The Synthetics

and the Smudge brushes are blending brushes like the desktop version has.

This is the new color picker complete with eyedropper and Copic color menu.

Here is the pop-up brush menu from the floating puck.

Here is the pop-up color picker from the floating puck.

'Pearl of Great Price'

I created this painting in the new Sketchbook Pro app for Android. The new Synthetic brushes were very nice and give this picture a nice oil painting look. Prints of this painting are available at http://www.redbubble.com/people/ellietaylorart