

Procreate is, without a doubt, the best iPad drawing app around at the moment. If you know you're going to be doing a lot of digital art and you want the best software, a Creative Cloud subscription is probably the way to go (our guide to the best Adobe Creative Cloud deals is regularly updated with the best deals).

Adobe of course offers its own vector editor in the form of Adobe Illustrator, and you don't necessarily need to choose between them, as getting a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud gives you both.

The only real drawback of Photoshop is that it's not a vector editor, meaning you don't get smooth, scalable lines. And new features are being added all the time – we particularly loved the new neural filters in our Photoshop 2022 review, where we said "Photoshop 2022 is so good at so many things it’s hard not to recommend buying it". There's also an impressive library of Photoshop plugins available to add extra functionality. You can easily share your data and access all of your assets, including brushes, images, colours and styles, across all of your devices. Check out our guide to how to download Photoshop to find out more. Selecting a region changes the language and/or content on works across a wide range of devices, including smartphones and tablets as well as Macs and PCs. But she’s worked with animation, both personally and professionally, and is currently in the process of producing two animated shorts. More recently, she’s been happy with her drawing tablet so she can create anywhere she happens to be. Early on, she liked to use mechanical pencils (nothing fancy), art markers, colored pencils, and brush pens for inking. Sketching allows her to place more emphasis on flow and expression than on anatomical precision, and it reduces stiffness in her final drawings.

Lois practices sketching and speed painting to continue improving her skills as a digital painter. When choosing brushes for a project, she usually picks one and sticks with it, since switching brushes takes her out of her flow. Lois likes to keep it simple and doesn’t add too many tools that could disrupt her progress. She took some art classes along the way through elementary and high school, and a bit in college, but is mostly a self-taught artist who finds inspiration in artwork she finds while browsing the Internet, watching movies and animated films, and taking walks through nature. Lois van Baarle has been drawing since before she can remember.
