Ekakiba: Manga & Pixel Art

Three places to draw in one app: draft manga with panels, screentone and balloons, animate pixel art into GIFs, or paint freely with 50 brushes and layers.

Ekakiba is a drawing app where you choose where to draw: Canvas, Pixel Art or Manga Draft. On iPad with Apple Pencil, pressure and tilt shape every line. On iPhone, draw with your finger.

■ Manga Draft Start from a panel layout (4-panel strip, 3 or 4 tiers, big panel, 2 tiers, or none), or make your own: draw a line to split a panel (slanted lines work too), or drag out a rectangle to add one. Gutters are spaced for you. Every page begins with a Sketch layer and an Inks layer, and the brush switches for you: a light-blue pencil for sketching, a black G-pen for inking. Fade or hide the sketch with one tap to check your inks.

• Balloons and dialogue: tap to place a balloon and type the lines. Round, box (narration), burst (shout) and cloud (thought). Drag to move. Japanese text sets vertically. • Screentone: tap an enclosed area to apply dots or hatching. It stays inside the panel border. • Lettering: gothic, mincho and rounded Japanese fonts plus 15 display fonts, with text color and outline. Import your own .ttf or .otf fonts.

■ Pixel Art Draw one pixel at a time on grids from 16×16 to 128×128, with pen, eraser, fill, line, rectangle, ellipse, eyedropper and mirror. Add frames to animate, with the previous frame shown faintly underneath, then export an animated GIF.

■ Canvas 50 brushes for sketching, inking, painting and manga: pencils, charcoal, G-pen, brush pen, watercolor, gouache, markers, crayon, pastel, solid black, white-out and more. Each brush remembers its own size and opacity.

• Bucket fill: tap inside your lines and the color goes underneath them • Airbrush: soft or spray, with pressure-controlled density, plus a soft-edged airbrush eraser • Shapes: line, rectangle, ellipse, circle, regular polygon, polyline and curve, stroked with your current brush and optionally filled • 19 filters: color adjustments, gradient map, line extraction, blurs, mosaic, outline, glow and more, previewed live • Free transform and mesh warp. Stroke layers stay editable strokes • 30 materials: patterns, traditional Japanese motifs, focus and speed lines, stamps and frames • Animation: each layer is a frame, with onion skinning • Grid overlay for blocking in shapes • Layers: visibility, opacity and order, plus blend modes (multiply, screen, overlay and more) and clipping to the layer below • Photo import for underdrawings and tracing, and a floating reference window • Perspective guide: 1-point and 2-point. Lines snap straight toward the vanishing points • Flip view, lasso, eyedropper and ruler

■ Feels like a drawing tablet • Two fingers to move and zoom • Two-finger tap to undo, three-finger tap to redo • Double-tap Apple Pencil to switch to the eraser (follows your system setting) • Turn on "Draw only with Apple Pencil" so fingers only move and zoom • On iPad, tools sit in a vertical dock on the left so your other hand can adjust size and opacity • Settings for the current tool (eraser type, shape and so on) stay visible in a bar

■ Daily prompts A new theme appears in your gallery every day. Draw it on consecutive days to build a streak.

■ Save and export Your work saves automatically. Export PNG, JPEG or PDF, with a transparent background or each layer as its own image. You can also make a time-lapse video that replays your strokes in order. Save to Photos or Files (including iCloud Drive), or share to other apps.

■ Unlocking brushes Pencil 2B, G-pen and watercolor, plus the manga sketch pencil and inking G-pen, are always available. Other brushes unlock for the rest of your session when you watch an ad.

■ Premium (one-time purchase) • All 50 brushes, any time • Up to 12 layers (3 without Premium) • 64×64, 96×96 and 128×128 pixel art, and up to 24 animation frames (4 without Premium) • Screentone, perspective guide, blend modes and clipping • Burst and cloud balloons • Animated GIF (pixel art and canvas) and time-lapse video export • Saved palettes • No ads

Ads never appear while you're drawing.