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The Use Drawing Tools on Notes For iPhone and iPad is a great way to write down quick bits of information. With Notes, you can quickly save text notes, images, web pages, grids, and pretty much anything else you might need. But did you know you can also use it as a quick sketch pad?
Yes, you can add sketches to the Notes app, whether it’s a part of a typed note or a handwritten note as a whole. You can add diagrams, illustrations, and art to your notes on the best iPad by using your finger or an Apple Pencil (even the first generation).
How to Use Drawing Tools on Notes For iPhone and iPad
- Open the Notes app and create a new note
- Tap on the (+) plus button in the corner of the active note
- Tap on the little squiggly line icon to access the drawing tools
- Select your pen, pencil, or highlighter, change the color if you’d like, and start sketching
- When finished with the sketch, tap on “Done” to insert into the active note
How to Save a Drawing from iOS Notes App
You can also save a sketch or drawing you made in the Notes app by tapping the little sharing arrow icon and choosing “Saving Image.” Even though the Notes app has a skeumorphic textured background, that texture is not saved with the drawing. Instead, the sketch will save with a white background into your camera roll.
On an iPhone Plus, a drawing saved from the Notes app will save as a PNG file with a resolution of 1536 x 2048. You can click on the example image below (which has been turned into a compressed JPEG) to see a full-sized sample of a lovely sketch image made in the Notes app. As you can see, I did not do well in art class, but sometimes it’s the effort that counts.
Best Drawing Apps for iPhone
Adobe Fresco
Adobe Fresco is a free app made for artists that lets them draw and paint. The app combines the power of your favourite Photoshop brushes with the accuracy of vector brushes and the technology of Live Brushes. You can use watercolours and oils to paint, or you can use scalable vector brushes to make clean lines that are ready to print.
Free features include more than 50 Photoshop brushes, vector brushes, and Live Brushes, access to your own custom brushes, tools for creation, selections, masking, layers, and layer groups, auto-migration of Adobe Photoshop Sketch and Adobe Illustrator Draw projects, time-lapse video to watch your work in action, exporting to PNG or JPEG, and learning content. Premium features include automatic cloud sync with Photoshop and integration with Photoshop.
Tayasui Sketches
The focus of Tayasui Sketches is to give you the most realistic drawing tools and brushes to help you get creative. This sketching app is easy to use and looks like a real toolbox. It lets you make sketches, paintings, and illustrations anywhere, and you can even import photos.
It has more than 20 realistic tools, watercolour wet brushes, a brush editor and colour eyedropper, layers, export to PNG and PSD, backup to the cloud and sync across devices, and pressure stylus support. Each stroke works like a brush on paper, responding to how you move in terms of pressure, angle, and width. The interface is unique in that it hides the tools as you work, leaving you with a clean canvas that stays out of the way.
Paper by WeTransfer
If sketching is your thing, you can count on Paper by WeTransfer to give you perfectly designed tools that make it easy to sketch, paint, draw, and make collages without distracting menus or interface interruptions. You can put more than one photo on one page and cut, paste, move, and fix them without having to worry about layers.
Built-in mood boards and storyboards help you see how your ideas will look and how to make them happen. Sync your pages across all of your devices by putting them in journals. Even if you don’t know where to start with an idea, the Paper Store in the app can help. With help from the best artists, you can also put your idea on paper.