I really love Heavy Paint. I was a little late to Procreate, but once I started playing with it I couldn’t see a way back to using any other digital art app on iPad. Then I tried Heavy Paint (shown to me by a reader at our Vertex conference earlier this year) and I simply can’t stop toying around with it.
You can read our Procreate review, and our guide to the best drawing apps for iPad, which will soon feature Heavy Paint, for an overview of the competition. And as our coverage proves, it’s tough for a new developer to break into the digital art space, particularly on iPad, but Heavy Paint is elbowing its way in by offering something unique – a double-hit of ease-of-use and an addictively ‘digital’ aesthetic.
Unlike other digital painting apps for iPad, Heavy Paint revels in simplicity and celebrates the digitalness of its paint strokes and wildly vivid colours. This is a painting app that doesn’t waste processing power trying to solely emulate the look and feel of real world paints, chalks and blending, but instead joyfully exposes the digital, pixel-like quality of painting on an iPad. The results are stylised but infinitely enjoyable
Of course, there’s real world simulation in here, it’s why it feels good to use, but it can also be broken and exposed to create art that feels abstract and computerised. At its core Heavy Paint can be used just like Procreate, or any other digital art app for that matter, to paint and blend, but there are a number of tools in here that stretch what can be achieved.
The unique fan brushes and stylised colour jitter gives art created in Heavy Paint a beautifully ‘digital’ style, but also speeds up blocking in a scene. (Image credit: Future)
This quick sketch took me 10 minutes and I’m not a pro artist, it was mostly done using just two brushes. (Image credit: Future)
I love the fan brushes, for example. These can be easy ways to create curvy, organic shapes for repetitive leafs and trees. But after I fiddle with the Colour Jitter slider to pixelate the tones, the fun starts and my paintings become a little more digitised (see the pink brush examples above).
Other tools include the Rake for creating sharp lines around the canvas for a retro feel, as well as Line Blend of a quick gradient. Each tool has further textured presets to explore that can carve and dirty up an image, but the push for everything in Heavy Paint is speed. A tutorial on the developer’s website shouts “Learn Heavy Paint in eight minutes“, and you really can.
It’s the simplicity of the tools and how they can be merged and collided with for new and interesting, often retro-digital looking results, which feel truly current, that is fun. You can pick up Heavy Paint and have a finished sketch done in minutes and feel accomplished, which for newcomers to digital art is a real back-slap of confidence.
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Another quick scene using the unique fan brush to create quick leaf shapes and the merge tool. (Image credit: Future)
If you’re looking for a truly alternative digital painting app that puts experimentation and speed above achieving the purity of realism, Heavy Paint is the app you need. It’s the perfect doodler, the concept artist’s dream, the sketcher and plein air painter’s new friend, and I just can’t stop playing with it.
I’m using Heavy Paint on an iPad Pro, and this mobile version is still in beta, so there are issues, such as an over-sensitive Eyedropper, but it doesn’t hold back the fun. There’s also a Mac and Windows desktop edition and an Android version. Visit the Heavy Paint website for more details.
Is Heavy Paint free?
Heavy Paint costs £10 but on iPad but there is a free version on Android. If you are unsure and use an iPad, then a free trial version can be downloaded, and I’d highly recommend giving it a go.
