Essential drawing app for Mac
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Macs have always been known as creative machines for creative people. It's likely the reason you actually bought one! So naturally Macs offer a wide variety of opportunities for you to express yourself, whether that’s building apps, writing prose, or drawing.
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Having a good drawing app for Mac is priceless. Retina screens, accurate touchpads, and native support for a variety of inputs make sketching on Mac a pleasure. But with so many drawing programs to choose from, how do you pick the right one? Welcome to the no-sweat guide to the best free drawing software for Mac!
Best drawing, design, and editing apps
With Setapp, you don’t have to choose only one — get a large choice of the best drawing software to support your creativity flow.
The Best Drawing Programs On Mac Today
It's not easy to pinpoint the best drawing app for Mac. Is it one of the free drawing programs? Is it made for simple drawings or lets you paint on Mac beautifully? The level of skill has to be considered as well.
The collection of drawing apps below features something that appeals to everyone, from the Mac equivalent of Paint you can find on Windows to a simple drawing pad for Mac to the likes of Sketch software that can be used by professional designers too.
Communicate with the markup feature in Preview
If you just want to do a rough sketch for Mac or a few simple drawings, you don't necessarily need to go about downloading lots of drawing apps, you can just use a drawing app for Mac you've already got — Preview.
While most of us think of Preview as an image or PDF viewer, it's also packs a basic toolset for annotating, drawing, and sketching. To see what you can do with Preview:
- Open an image, document, or just a white sheet in Preview
- Click Show Markup Toolbar in its top menu
- From here you can choose tools, shapes, colors, thickness, type, and more to make necessary adjustments or create something completely new
- Save and share your image
Get nostalgic with Paintbrush
Lots of us remember the simplicity and versatility of Microsoft Paint. Macs used to have a similar app too called MacPaint (that’s been discontinued). Well, good news is some enthusiastic developers took the matter into their own hands and essentially recreated a Paint app for Mac — Paintbrush.
This Mac equivalent of Paint will strike you as a complete duplicate of that old software you used to love. It features all the same tools, including rectangular and oval shapes, paint bucket, pencil, spray, lines, etc. You can also easily switch and add colors to your palette as you go.
Make professional mockups with Sketch
If you’ve already outgrown simple drawings you can do with Preview and Paintbrush, and want to move higher — try Sketch.
Sketch took the world by storm just a few years ago, when they essentially introduced a viable alternative to complex apps like Adobe Illustrator and targeted it specifically to digital design professionals.
Everything you do in the Sketch program is done in vector, which means all shapes are infinitely resizable, in contrast to the raster graphics of Paintbrush. With Sketch for Mac, you can design high-fidelity mockups for your website, prototype your iOS app, or just create complex illustrations.
You can download and try the Sketch software for free, but after a month, you'll be required to pay the annual license fee, which is a big downside if you don’t plan to use the app regularly. In addition, Sketch for Mac is not the most accessible app for beginners and it’s not exactly a drawing app for Mac due to its vector nature.
Create digital art with MediBang Paint Pro
Perhaps an equivalent of Sketch, but in raster graphics, is MediBang Paint Pro. This drawing software for Mac allows you to execute your dreams beautifully with over 50 custom brushes as well as its extensive support for layers and fonts.
Originally developed for comic creators, MediBang Paint Pro got quickly adopted by everyone looking for a versatile drawing pad for Mac and is hailed by many as the best free drawing software around. However, since it was built for the purpose of creating comics, you might face a few problems adapting it to your needs — it’s definitely one quirky drawing app for Mac. Another issue is the app’s slow update release cycle. So far, it’s been unavailable to macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur users due to the lack of security updates from the developers. This means you can only use MediBang Paint Pro on macOS 10.13 or older.
Set your imagination free with Tayasui Sketches
Talking about the best drawing programs, it’s simply impossible to avoid Tayasui Sketches. This intuitive sketch program is universally loved by painters, designers, illustrators, and art aficionados alike.
Ultimate drawing app for Mac
Draw on your Mac’s screen like on canvas with Tayasui Sketches. Mix colors and experiment with limitless layers!
Tayasui Sketches makes it easy to bring what you have in mind to reality with its support for unlimited layers, infinite undos, smart rules, and a wide variety of drawing tools. If you want to paint on Mac, nothing else comes close to representing the physical experience of applying colors to paper than this drawing software for Mac.
To start your drawing pad for Mac with Tayasui Sketches:
- Open a new document
- Try out all the different tools from the sidebar, from a fine pen to an airbrush
- Use supporting menus to modify your currently selected tool and mix just the right color
With just a bit of practice, you’ll see why Tayasui Sketches beats all the free drawing programs out there. Time for your digital painting skills to skyrocket!
Save all the cool colors with Sip
Regardless of the drawing software for Mac you choose to use in the end, one of the most difficult things to do is going to be finding the right colors out there. Sometimes, you might come across a beautiful color you might use in the future, but where do you save it? Sip.
Sip is the most intuitive, handy, and non-intrusive palette organizer available for Mac. This little utility lives in your Mac’s menu bar, where it saves all the colors you like and simultaneously features a tiny color picker on the side of your screen, which makes Sip instantly available in any sketch program for Mac, like Tayasui Sketches, for example.
By now, you should be well-equipped to start on your Mac drawing journey, using the selection of the drawing software for Mac listed above, whether it’s a simple annotation or a large-scale digital painting.
Best of all, you can try Tayasui Sketches and Sip for free by signing up for a free seven-day trial on Setapp, a platform for more than 200 unique creative Mac apps that literally help you bring your dreams to reality. Why wait, check it out now!
Slowly and steadily MS Paint and Adobe Photoshop are being replaced by stronger and more popular freeware. Our list includes all the popular digital painting software, free download links as well as professional painting software, free download sources.
Related:
These help you either convert digital images into paintings or make your own paintings from scratch using the latest tools and techs.
1. PowerPaint
A sound replacement of MS Paint and other well known but cumbersome photo editing software programs, this one is a complete image editor with all the tools and presets required to edit photos, images and add loads of textures to them too.
- Compatible with almost all current Windows OS versions.
- Includes a separate Image Dropdown menu with a plethora of features.
- Pre-set shapes, lines, banners and charts.
- Tons of graph features.
2. Corel PaintShop Pro (32 Bit)
One of the few trail version software which come with complete feature sets of the real deal. This software is ideal for painting on and editing all photos and images with a touch of expertise.
- Indulge in quick fixes using the Express Lab and the Smart carver or try out the tons of different tools and options to create professional grade photos.
- Main set of tools include RAW Lab, Express Lab, Advanced Tools, Smart Carver and Integrated Tools.
3. Pint.NET
This is a free to use photo editing software which supports multiple layers.
- Advanced settings to turn your images into oil paintings and sketches.
- Work on several images side by side.
- Record a history of changes and processes for easy removal of effects and edits.
- Easy shortcuts for functions.
- One touch optimizing and retouching of all images using a bunch of free and integrated tools.
4. EZ Paint
This is an extremely easy to use software which is a free alternative to MS Paint. It comes with more tools and options as well.
- Easy drawing of line, arcs, curves and accompanying editing tools.
- Has more than 30 custom built-in shapes.
- Aimed at regular users who require something more than paint but less complicated than Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw.
- Compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
5. Tux Paint
A very popular paint software which has been sought after by all young image editors, graphic designers and digital painters. The interface is extremely child-friendly and hence is very well suited for all budding talents.
- Colorful and simple interface with minimal commands.
- The bunch of features include Tux Paint Stamps, magic designs, colors, effects and a variety of brushes.
- Includes over 100 brand new stamps.
- Includes autosave and recover features.
6. Fresh paint for Windows 8
This is a free app for all windows users who want to add a touch of hand drawn painting to all their photos and images. This can edit BMP, JPEG and TIFF images without any trouble whatsoever.
- Perfect for Windows 8 users and ideal for touchscreen devices.
- Blend and mix colors to create new shades.
- Realistic painting effects.
- Fun graphical interface well suited for all age groups.
Best Free Art Programs For Mac Free
7. Tux Paint Stamps 2009-06-28
The Tux Paint Stamps are ideal for the creative souls who also love fun in art. This adds an easy charm of pop-art to your creations.
Drawing Software For Mac
- Free and easy installation.
- A huge collection of free, cool stamps.
- Easy to access and implement.
- Compatible with Tux Paint Software (and other versions).
- Compatible with Windows 7, Windows 2000, Windows Vista and Windows 8.
8. Mario Paint Composer
This software comes with an air of creativity and freedom of exploration. This one is ideal for all the new and daring painters and designers who are looking for a lot more than MS Paint.
- This is an extremely fun way to “paint” music using symbols like flowers, automobiles, airplanes and cute hearts.
- Ideal for kids and teachers who want to add some fun to their classes.
- Authentic SNES experience.
9. TAG: The Power of Paint
Best Free Art Programs For Mac Download
A very unique creation, this gaming software is used for making all kinds of creative graphic designs. This is in sync with the growing popularity of graffiti and wall-art.
- Bold and creative way of creating new designs and clearing each level of the game.
- New tools and paint as ammo to obtain different powers and make your move.
- Jump, throw, boost your speed using different colors and by drawing different patterns.
10. PaintTool SAI
A drawing utility software which is ideal for all levels of painters and designers who use their Windows device to power their creations.
- Has all basic image editing tools including airbrushes, paintbrushes, watercolors, erasers and pencils.
- Ready to use shapes and clip-arts.
- Supported by simple interface and navigation.
- Supports PSD, JPG, BMP, SAI, PNG and TGA formats.
- Supports layers and canvases.
Here we have presented to you a huge array of software programs which revolve around painting; they include editing software as well as gaming software which use paint as a level boosting feature.