ibisPaint: How a Free Mobile App Became a Professional Art Tool

ibisPaint has achieved something remarkable: it has made professional-quality digital art creation accessible to anyone with a smartphone. With over 400 million downloads worldwide, it is the most popular drawing application on mobile devices—and its popularity is deserved. What began as a simple mobile sketch tool has evolved into a surprisingly capable painting application with features that rival desktop software costing hundreds of dollars.

The app's 15,000+ brushes, comprehensive layer system, advanced stabilization, and extensive filter library provide a feature set that is genuinely useful for serious artwork—not just casual doodling. Professional artists have created portfolio-quality illustrations, manga pages, and character designs entirely within ibisPaint, demonstrating that the mobile platform is no longer inherently limiting for digital art.

Why ibisPaint Dominates Mobile Art

Accessibility

The core app is free, removing the financial barrier that prevents many aspiring artists from trying digital art. Premium features—ad removal, additional brushes, and filters—are available through affordable subscriptions, but the free version is powerful enough for serious work.

Drawing Process Video

ibisPaint automatically records your entire drawing process, which can be shared as a timelapse video. This feature has made the app enormously popular on social media, where drawing process videos attract massive engagement. For learning purposes, watching other artists' process recordings provides valuable insight into professional workflows.

Social Features

The built-in social platform allows artists to share work, discover other artists, and participate in community challenges. This social layer transforms ibisPaint from a solitary tool into a community experience.

Feature Depth

The Brush Engine

ibisPaint's 15,000+ brush library covers an extraordinary range of artistic needs: inking brushes for clean linework, painting brushes that simulate oil, watercolor, and acrylic media, airbrush tools for smooth gradients and rendering, texture brushes for adding surface detail, and specialty brushes for effects like fire, clouds, and foliage. The brush engine supports pressure sensitivity on compatible devices, and custom brush parameters allow artists to fine-tune brush behavior to match their personal workflow preferences.

Layer System

The comprehensive layer system supports blending modes, opacity control, clipping masks, layer folders, and alpha lock—features that are essential for professional digital painting workflows and that distinguish ibisPaint from simpler mobile drawing apps. Artists accustomed to Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint's layer-based workflows will find ibisPaint's layer system familiar and functional.

Stabilization

ibisPaint's line stabilization is among the best available on mobile devices, smoothing hand tremor and device-input imprecision to produce clean, confident strokes. Adjustable stabilization strength allows artists to balance between perfectly smooth lines and responsive, natural-feeling marks. For inking and linework—where clean strokes are essential—this stabilization makes professional-quality results achievable on a touchscreen.

Selection and Transform Tools

Professional selection tools including lasso, magic wand, and polygonal selection enable precise editing of specific image areas. Transform tools including scale, rotate, perspective warp, and mesh distortion provide the manipulation capabilities needed for compositing and refinement work.

The Mobile Art Revolution

ibisPaint is both a product and a driver of the mobile art revolution—the movement of serious digital art creation from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets. For millions of young artists worldwide, particularly in regions where desktop computers and professional tablets are prohibitively expensive, a smartphone running ibisPaint represents their first and primary digital art tool. The quality of work being produced on smartphones by these artists—often using nothing more than a finger on a screen—challenges assumptions about the hardware required for serious digital art.

This democratization has had a profound impact on global art communities. Artists from countries where professional art supplies and digital equipment are luxury goods can now create, share, and develop their work using the smartphone they already own. The resulting influx of talent from previously underrepresented regions has enriched online art communities and demonstrated that artistic ability is universal even when access to professional tools is not.

Learning Through Process Videos

ibisPaint's automatic process recording creates a powerful learning ecosystem. Every drawing created in the app can generate a timelapse video showing the complete creation process from first stroke to finished artwork. These videos—widely shared on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram—serve as visual tutorials that teach technique, workflow, and creative problem-solving through observation rather than instruction.

For aspiring artists, watching process videos from skilled ibisPaint users provides insight into professional thinking patterns: how experienced artists plan compositions, build up values and colors systematically, handle corrections and revisions, and make the thousands of micro-decisions that produce polished finished work. This observational learning is particularly valuable for self-taught artists who lack access to formal instruction.

ibisPaint vs. Procreate

The most common comparison for ibisPaint is Procreate, the premium iPad painting app. Procreate offers a more refined painting experience with superior brush engine performance and more sophisticated color tools, but it requires an iPad and costs $12.99. ibisPaint runs on any smartphone or tablet (iOS and Android) and is free—making it accessible to a vastly larger audience. For artists who own iPads, both apps have legitimate roles; for the hundreds of millions of artists who don't, ibisPaint is the clear choice.

Who Benefits Most

Young and aspiring artists who are developing their skills and cannot invest in professional equipment will find ibisPaint provides genuinely capable tools at no cost.

Smartphone-only artists in regions where tablets and computers are inaccessible will find ibisPaint makes serious digital art creation possible on hardware they already own.

Social media artists who want to share process videos alongside finished work will find ibisPaint's automatic recording feature uniquely valuable for building audience engagement.

The Bottom Line

ibisPaint has democratized digital art creation by placing a genuinely capable painting application—with 15,000+ brushes, comprehensive layers, professional stabilization, and automatic process recording—in the pockets of over 400 million people worldwide. For aspiring artists who cannot afford expensive hardware and software, ibisPaint provides a legitimate and powerful starting point for developing digital art skills that can grow into professional practice.