Paperless - Draw, Paint and Sketch App for the iPad

Drawing of my beautiful wife using Paperless.

While searching the vast reaches of iTunes I occasionally stumble upon an app that reminds me of other apps that I have already reviewed. Paperless - Draw, Paint and Sketch for the iPad OS 4.0 or later reminds me of other apps I have reviewed, but not in a good way.

If you have even thought about sketching on your iDevice you have run across Paper by 53 which is one of the staples when it comes to digital sketching on your iPad. Like Paper, "Paper-less" creates sketchbooks for you to organize your work by title so you can find your project later. Just like Paper and Sketches, two apps that faced off on my blog a few weeks ago, uses a basic array of drawing tools. Paperless feels a lot like Paper in its utilization of pencil, pen, brush, a marker and an eraser tools to create an edit marks. Unlike Paper, Paperless comes with all the drawing tools pre-loaded where you have to purchase tools in Paper by 53.

Paperless does allow yo to change brush settings, but not on every brush.

Paperless has re-do and undo buttons that allows you to go back or go forward up to 15 changes. You can use the color tool to organize colors by using a color palette of recently selected colors for quick access later on. You can adjust the each brush tools' opacity, shape, smoothness, etc. as you go into and lay-down marks. I did find however that when you made changes to size of the brush or its opacity that the brush itself didn't always change. I was sketching a tea kettle on my stove as I started to play with the app I decided the outline was to thick. I thinned the line and it took about 10 marks before the line actually thinned. I would continue to make marks and after 5 or 6 marks it would become thick and the next 4 or 5 would change to thin without any adjustment to the app on my part. I know that some apps utilize pressure sensitive styluses that can adjust to changes in pressure, but at the time I was using a standard stylus that does not register the change.

I decided to really see what this app could do so I drew a picture of my beautiful wife Malinda. I started with a blue layer as an under drawing, outlined it with black and added a third layer for color.I quickly realized that you can not change the order in which the layers are stacked, so I had to trace the image with black underneath the blue under drawing. Going back and forth, turning the blue layer on and off was very frustrating. I appreciate that Paperless allows you to create layers, but not being able to change the order of the layers ruined a good sketch. Unless you go into the app and figure this out on your own there is no way to tell. You are very limited with three layers so I decided to go in and add a background to the image after I started the sketch. I then realized that if you change the background it will cover over whatever is already there instead of adding a new background on a separate layer.

Paperless does allow you to create a sketchbook to store your sketches as well as lets you name each sketchbook adding pages to it as you go. I decided to add my sketch of Malinda to my "ArtTechReview" sketchbook when low and behold I discovered that you had to create the book first and add pages as you go. Unfortunately that meant that I could not add Malinda to my collection! :(

Pros and the Cons for Paperless...

Pros

Paperless lets you create sketchbooks to organize your work.

1. The app is fairly inexpensive as far as drawing apps go and it comes with a lot more options out of the box than similar apps like Paper by 53.
2. You can create sketchbooks to organize your work and personalize your projects as you move along.
3. There are a number of build in controls to edit different drawing tools allowing the artist to change opacity, size of the brush, brush thickness, etc.
4. You can access a number of colors that you have previously selected which keeps you from having to use the eye-dropper tool to select previously used colors.

Cons

1. Layers! I can't tell you how upset I was when I discovered that my under-drawing was stuck on top and that you could only use 3 layers in your work. For someone who uses 10-20 layers per drawing this felt very limiting.
2. Brush controls were very limiting. I also discovered that only certain adjustments could be made in each tool. The pencil for example only allowed you to adjust the size of the mark and nothing else. The brush allowed you to adjust the thickness, opacity, softness, etc, but these options were left off other tools. I understand that there are only so many adjustments that could be made with a real pencil, but it would be nice to experiment a little more.
3. Not being able to add pictures to sketchbooks unless you build the sketchbook first.
4. You can rotate the iPad, but not the canvas with your fingers. If you notice I have one vertical picture and two horizontal. The tools do not move and re-adjust themselves like they do in most drawing apps that I have tried. 

Over all I would go with Sketches over both Paper and Paperless if I wanted a good sketching app. Sketches is a buck cheaper than Paperless so if you want a basic and easy to use app then go with Sketches and leave Paperless in the nether regions of iTune's app store .

I give Paperless for the iPad...

2 stars out of 5