About iPastels

A painting app for all artists, whether you’re experienced or just starting out.
Create beautiful works of art or a quick sketch whenever you have a burst of inspiration!
You can also try out ideas and compositions before starting on a new painting in real life, or practise and refine your skills, all without the added cost of art supplies.

Screenshot

iPad screenshot

• LIFELIKE PASTEL SIMULATION •
The app features live-calculated brushes and strokes, making a realistic pastel simulation possible. Painting tools include soft pastels, oil pastels, pastel pencils, smudge tool, and more.

• REALISTIC PAPER/CANVAS TEXTURES •
When creating a new picture, a unique, non-repeating paper texture is generated that will interact in real-time with the live-calculated strokes you paint.
You can change the default-generated texture to something else, for example “Canvas”, which is especially well suited for oil pastels. Press Layers button -> “Paper” -> “Regenerate”.

• PRECISE COLOR BLENDING •
When painting, especially with soft pastels, use Smudge or the Cotton Swab to blend and smoothen the colors right on the paper, as you would in real life. With oil pastels, in addition to smudging, the blending is often done by the pastel sticks themselves (for best results, reduce the force or use a similar or lighter color).

• USE TOUCH RADIUS TO CONTROL SIZE (iPad/iPhone) •
Applying more or less of your fingertip when painting will change the stroke size accordingly.
We can’t even begin to tell you how convenient this is, you have to try it!

• APPLE PENCIL (iPad) •
Full support for Apple Pencil and Apple Pencil 2. In addition, you can assign a second painting tool, such as Smudge, to the finger. Tap twice on a tool, and select the option “Use as 2nd Tool”.

• EASY AND QUICK TO USE COLOR PALETTE •
Changing the color is only a tap/click away, and the palette can be customized.

• METAL • SWIFT •
The engine is based on Metal (with 128-bit color and floating-point arithmetic), and the app was developed entirely using Swift (earlier versions used C++).

• WIDE COLOR • MULTIPLE LAYERS • PHOTO TRACING MODE • SEAMLESS PATTERN EDITING MODE • FULL SCREEN PAINTING • PARAMETERS CAN BE CHANGED LIVE •

Gallery

Tutorials

Support

iPastels

The natural choice for artists

iPad screenshot

A painting app for experts and beginners alike
Painting oil pastels on canvas

Oil pastels on canvas

Painting soft pastels on paper

Soft pastels, with smudging, on paper

LIFELIKE PASTEL SIMULATION BUILT WITH SWIFT REALISTIC PAPER/CANVAS BASED ON METAL PRECISE COLOR BLENDING QUICK‑TO‑USE COLOR PALETTE FINGERTIP = STROKE SIZE APPLE PENCIL SUPPORT PHOTO TRACING MODE MULTIPLE LAYERS SEAMLESS PATTERN EDITING MODE WIDE COLOR DIALS & BUTTONS CAN BE USED LIVE FULL SCREEN PAINTING FREE DOWNLOAD IPAD IPHONE MAC

These are the currently featured paintings from the gallery.

The featured paintings above are all copyright their respective artists.
They are generally not hosted on this website, only linked to.
If you want us to remove a link, or change its attribution details, please let us know.

Gallery Submissions

To qualify, your painting has to be created using the iPastels app,
and uploaded to a website that hosts images.

We regularly search for "iPastels" on various image hosting websites/communities
and add links to paintings that, for one reason or another, catch our eyes.

Below is a list of some of the websites that we currently monitor.
We have no affiliations with any of them, but they are free to use and well established.
(Though you should read their Terms & Conditions to see if it’s a good match for you.)

Image Hosts/Communities: DeviantArt • flickr
Blog Hosts: tumblr
Forums: reddit

Please mention "iPastels" in the description, tag, or title, otherwise we won't be able to find it.