Brushes 3 3.1

If you’ve got some artistic bones in your body, then you’ve probably already tried your hand at painting or, at the very least, making some pretty cool drawings. It’s not everyone that can do things properly, of course, but you can at the very least have some fun with things.

Brushes 3 is an app that was created for iOS, but that hasn’t exactly been updated in a while. This makes the app run a bit wonky on devices sporting later iOS version. It’s unclear if this is only a problem with the operating system or one that extends to hardware as well.

Since I tested the app on an iPhone 6 Plus, the results weren’t as majestic as advertised. In fact, they were downright ugly, not that I have any kind of talent at drawing, but anything I tried out wouldn’t have come up nicely since every time I drew a line, it came out with a pixelated border that was as thick as the actual brush stroke, which you can notice in the screenshots. The problem doesn’t affect all brushes, but it’s still extremely annoying.

Could be great

Other than this utterly annoying problem, Brushes 3 comes with some pretty cool features, which makes it a shame that no one has taken care to update the app in a long time. 

You may choose the colors you want to draw with without having to pick out a handful of swatches. Even better, you can decide on the color’s opacity levels from the get-go.

The app allows you to make some additional changes. For instance, you can choose to place a photograph on the canvas. To clear the layer in one sweeping motion, rather than have to use the eraser, to fill the layer with a solid color or to desaturate the layer. You may also invert the colors and transform the layer, giving you more options to control the way it looks.

Layer support

Since we’ve been talking about layers, I should mention that one of the great features this app has is the capacity to work with layers. You can tap on the right corner button to access the layers page, where you can choose whether any of these are visible, whether they’re locked in and whether the background is solid or transparent. It’s also possible to choose one of four blending options (normal, multiply, screen, exclude). Overall, this is a pretty awesome feature that not many apps have and that will be quite familiar to those who have played around with more advanced photo editing apps, such as Photoshop.

This app has some great potential, but the fact that it was updated so long ago makes working with it on more recent devices and OS versions a chore. 

Add to watchlist:

Drawing

• Autodesk SketchBook 3.1.2
• Adobe Ideas 2.9.2
• Pic2Comic 1.2.2