Tayasui Sketches app review – Sketching & simplicity combined

Tayasui Sketches is a user-friendly drawing app for iPhone and also for Android too. Other than the basic drawing features, the app also offers daily drawing activities for users. The app also has a community feature, where you can view others’ drawings.

The app’s interface is very simple and minimalistic, which makes it a good app for beginners. The additional activities the app offers are also good methods for encouraging users draw more, and explore the realm of art.

Tayasui Sketches review

Tayasui Sketches seems to be a nice and simple drawing app, especially for beginners looking to get into digital art. It’s one of the more popular apps for those that draw digitally from their mobile device.

However, the app does have its limitations and drawbacks in comparison to other drawing apps. We’ll go through both the pros and cons of Tayasui Sketches in this review.

Free To Use

Tayasui Sketches is free to download and use.

However, some features are locked unless you purchase the pro version. Fortunately, Tayasui Sketches Pro is not a subscription service. It is quite cheap, at a one-time payment of £4.99, which is a fair price to pay for all the tools.

The app is pretty vague about what specific benefits the pro version will provide. This can make it hard to decide whether it’s worth purchasing.

The free version still offers quite a range of features, such as a series of different brushes and other drawing tools.

This allows free users to be able to use the app for its core purpose – drawing. This can help users determine whether the app is worth investing in. Different artists will have different preferences when it comes to a digital drawing application.

Unfortunately, the free version has quite a large drawback. It limits users to only being able to use two layers. This makes the drawing experience very limited, and can make it difficult to test the app out properly before deciding to purchase the pro version.

Having the ability to use multiple layers is a very basic and essential feature regarding drawing apps. Without this feature, artists can struggle to draw as they normally would digitally.

Thus, only having two layers makes it hard to sufficiently experiment with the app. This can discourage new users, as there are many alternative free drawing apps that do allow users to use more than two layers.

Shallow Learning Curve

Tayasui Sketches has a fairly shallow learning curve. Its UI is very simple and minimalistic. It has few settings to keep track of, and mostly limits itself to the basic drawing tools. This makes the app easy to understand and learn.

The app’s settings are mostly self-explanatory. When you use or press one of them, a notice with its name/purpose on it will pop up. This is good for helping users remember what each option does.

However, most of the options are not labelled initially. This can make them confusing to understand at first.

Users must learn the app through using it. Beginners to digital art may have trouble with this, as they’re not knowledgeable on the basic digital drawing tools.

Furthermore, none of the tools are ever named. Even when you press on them, there is no notice that clarifies what each one does.

This can make it difficult to learn and remember what each tool does. You can only guess what each one does by their icon, or see what each one does by using them.

Additionally, there are a few options that are not very clear. For example, in order to erase a layer, you have to double-press the eraser tool.

On the other hand, the app has some features that should be universally known, at least to most.

Such features include the colour wheel, and the undo and redo options. Since these should be familiar to most users, they are easy features to learn and understand.

The other features are also based on concepts that should be familiar to most people; such as opacity, size, layers, brushes, and rulers. There aren’t any convoluted options that would take a lot of time to comprehend. Thus, overall, the app has a shallow learning curve.

App Features

The free version of Tayasui Sketches has quite a limited selection of drawing tools. There are only a few of each type of drawing tool, and nine drawing tools overall.

However, the app does offer quite a wide range of tools. There’s pens, crayons, brushes, and more.

Unfortunately, the tools aren’t named, which can make it difficult to know what each one is capable of doing. It’s also hard to know how each tool should be treated or used.

You can’t find out what the tools are called on the app itself. You can only find out by going on the settings, and pressing ‘tools info’.

This will take you out of the app, and onto their website. This is quite inconvenient as it doesn’t specify that it will make you leave the app, and can disrupt user experiences.

The nine drawing tools consist of a pencil, a Rotring pen, a felt pen, a pen brush, an oil pastel, an acrylic brush, a watercolour brush, an air brush, and an ink pen.

The non-drawing tools seem to be quite extensive. These include a smudge tool, a select tool, a ruler, an eraser, a paint bucket, a text tool, a symmetry tool, and a line tool.

The text tool only offers four different fonts to choose from in the free version, but this is not that problematic as the main purpose of the app is drawing.

The ruler tool only has one ruler to choose from, but it also doubles as a protractor. It can be rotated as well.

In regards to the smudge tool, there is a major drawback. You can’t seem to control the smudge level on the smudge tool. This makes the tool quite a limited one. You’ll only be able to smudge on one intensity level.

Furthermore, the zoom sensitivity is a little low. It doesn’t always respond to the finger-pinching motion. This makes the zoom feature quite frustrating to use, and causes the whole drawing experience to be a fairly disruptive.

The zoom feature is a commonly-used feature when it comes to digital drawing, so it being faulty is a great inconvenience.

On a more positive note, the app does offer a feature that is quite rare for free drawing apps. It offers a range of page textures to choose from.

This allows for some freedom in regards to canvas customisation.

Furthermore, the colour features are quite extensive. You can choose your own colours from the colour wheel, and add them to the colour tab for easy access.

You can also edit or remove colours from the tab. This allows for full freedom in regards to controlling the colour options.

Additional Features

In addition to basic drawing features, the app also offers daily drawing activities for its users. The activities are created by other artists; and include colouring pre-drawn art, and completing another’s drawing. This encourages users to draw more often, and interact with other artists.

The app also provides a community section, where you can view other users’ art. There are several categories to look through; such as popular, new, pro, and featured.

You can like the different artworks, or copy them onto a canvas of your own. You can also upload your own artwork there.

Additionally, the app has a sketchbook feature, where you can add and remove sketchbooks. These sketchbooks essentially act as folders that contain your artwork. You can rename the sketchbooks to your liking, and customise their colours.

You can choose which sketchbook you wish to add canvases to. This allows you to organise your artwork.

Common Questions

Conclusion

In conclusion, Tayasui Sketches is a simple drawing app. It has all the basic drawing features you need to make digital art, and is quite easy to use.

However, there is no starting tutorial, which can discourage beginners to digital drawing. The app doesn’t explain most of its features, including its drawing tools. This is quite problematic as new users won’t know what the tools can or should do.

Nevertheless, the app is quite easy to pick-up as you use it. It’s a nice app for beginners to digital art, but may not suffice for more experienced artists. The pro version may offer much more features, which may appeal to a more experienced audience.

However, there’s just so much competition for art programs, regarding both free and paid ones. It’s hard to say whether this program is a good choice for digital artists.

The app is worth testing out, though. Different artists have different preferences regarding drawing programs. Tayasui Sketches may just be the one for you. It’s free to try out, and the pro version is quite cheap. So, it may be worth purchasing. It’s a low investment either way.