ibis Paint X: a thousand brushes, paid for with ads
ibis Paint X hands out more brushes and layers than paid rivals and charges for it in advertising. We look at who that trade suits.
ibis Paint X is built around generosity: layers, blend modes, over a thousand brushes and recorded time-lapses — everything other apps charge for on day one.
What it gives you
A brush library paid rivals do not have. There are more than a thousand, from pencil to watercolour texture. For someone who does not yet know what they want to draw with, that matters more than any other feature.
Tools built for anime and manga: perspective rulers, symmetry, fill-by-outline, screentones. The set is assembled around one school of drawing, and the app is more honest for it than the general-purpose ones.
Process recording. Time-lapse is captured automatically, with no setup — and it is what people share more often than the finished piece.
What it costs
Advertising. The free version shows clips in exchange for temporary access to some brushes and filters. The mechanic is exactly as irritating as intended, and a subscription removes it.
The interface. Dense, small buttons, nested menus — the price of having many tools. On a phone it is felt more than on a tablet.
Who it is not for
Anyone who draws with a finger now and then. The abundance gets in the way here: reaching a plain pencil means walking past nine hundred brushes.
And anyone thrown off by ads mid-work. Sketchbook does less but never interrupts.