MignonSketch: Watercolor Paint

Mignon Sketch is a real-paint app that brings analog media — watercolor, oil, pencil and more — to iPhone and iPad.

Just like real watercolor, paint soaks into the paper and spreads with the water it carries. Wet-on-wet is supported: layer a color before it dries and the edges mix, layer it after and the color below shows through. Water and pigment are tracked separately, so drying and backruns behave as they should, and colors blend the way pigments do — blue and yellow make green, and overmixing turns muddy. Oil builds up with real thickness, while pencil, crayon and pastel wear against the tooth of the paper.

A fast brush engine built on GPU / Metal runs all of this smoothly, even on iPhone — the expression of desktop natural-media software, on the device in your hand.

64 brushes and 28 papers. Start here, before you buy a single tube of paint.

■ 64 Brushes

・Watercolor (11): Pouring, Round, Wash, Quick Dry, Granulating, Stain, Lift, Edge, Bleed, Body, Water ・Oil (9): Round, Flat, Bright, Filbert, Sable Round, Sable Flat, Impasto, Scumble, Blender ・Pencil (14): 4B / 2B / HB / F in point, broad and chisel tips, plus Wax and Soft ・Colored pencil (6), crayon (7), pastel (6): oil and wax cores, soft and hard sticks ・Gold and silver leaf (4): one brush lays the base and leaf, one places leaf alone ・Airbrush (6): Standard, Spray, Even, Spatter, Detail, Dust. Digital pen (1)

Every brush is adjustable: water load, drying and granulation for watercolor, bristle count and furrow depth for oil, graphite and clay for pencil.

■ 28 Papers

・Watercolor (8): Rough, Medium, Fine, Hot Press, Cotton Rough, Cartridge, Block, Handmade ・Washi (5): Kozo, Kumohada Mashi, Gasenshi, Torinoko, Mashi ・Drawing (6): Kent, Drawing, Kraft, Sketchbook, Charcoal, Pastel ・Canvas (4): Cotton, Linen, Wood Panel, Board ・Other (5): Plain, Aged, Smooth White, Graph, Ruled

Set any paper color, and adjust tooth, retention and absorption.

■ Light, Tilt and Timelapse

・Three scenes — Canvas, Wood Panel and Simple — lit by up to 8 lights you place ・Oil impasto and gold leaf catch the light as you move it ・Wet paint runs the way you tilt the device and stops where it dries, per layer ・Your whole process records at 15x. Trim it, add an opening and ending, export as MP4

■ Apple Pencil and Controls

・Pressure, tilt and azimuth. Tilt the pencil and the brush lies down with it ・Editable pressure curve, and palm rejection while the Pencil hovers ・One finger draws, two fingers pan, zoom and rotate ・Long press to pick a color, two-finger tap to undo, three fingers to redo ・Size and opacity on edge sliders, remembered per brush and mode ・Brush, eraser and smudge. The pencil eraser works like a kneaded eraser ・Autosaves whenever you pause

■ Color and Layers

・Color wheel with HEX input, sliders, palettes and color history ・Drag a color onto the canvas to fill an area, with an adjustable threshold ・Layers: opacity, clipping, reorder and 20 blend modes ・Clear a layer, dry its paint or fix it wet. Set the background color ・Filters for threshold and line art, plus transform and canvas resize

■ References

Pin a photo, or a painting from the library, beside your canvas. Library pieces include a line-art layer to trace.

■ Canvas and Export

・Screen, square, large square, UHD or custom up to 8192 px. Or start from a photo ・Export PNG / JPEG, an MP4 timelapse, or .mgn to carry on another device ・Sort, group into folders, duplicate and rename on the home screen

■ Light and Fast

・Runs smoothly without a high-end device ・iPhone / iPad, iOS 17 or later. No network or account needed to paint ・34 languages. Free, with a one-time purchase to remove ads

■ Made For

・Anyone who would rather start with paint than with a digital pen ・Anyone curious about watercolor or oil before buying the materials ・Traditional artists looking for the same feel on a screen

Terms of Use (Apple Standard EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/