Zen Brush 3 is a drawing app focused on the strong yet beautiful feel of the East Asian ink brush which can be used to perform calligraphy, ink painting and more. The drawing system that brings to life a feeling of silky fluent and delicate painting now allows an even wider range of expression thanks to the addition of "water" and "color". Providing a new simple and intuitive user interface, this app is designed to be optimal for performing Zen art. Simply start the app and you are immediately ready to draw. Anyone, anywhere, can create superb Zen art with this app’s uniquely rich expressiveness. You can also easily share and edit your calligraphy and images with other apps using the Export functionality. Skillfully use the rich background style templates to create and share atmospheric artwork. - The drawing system simulates a 3D model of an East Asian ink brush to enable varied and natural styles of brush handling. - The adjustable amount of water makes it possible to create expressions ranging from powerful edge effects to "nijimi" (bleeding) and "bokashi" (blurring) where colors mix. - You can also enjoy creating colored-ink paintings as well as watercolor paintings by making use of 30 selected traditional Japanese colors. - The layer functionality allows more flexible editing. - Import photos to add text to them or use them as background images for tracing. - Create fascinating artwork with a rich assortment of background style templates. - Traditional Japanese paper templates provide an authentic feel. Features: - 5 main tools (ink brush, color brush, water brush, eraser, blotting paper). - 10 levels of thickness. - 5 levels of water (not applicable to blotting paper). - 10 levels of ink tone (not applicable to water brush and blotting paper). - Color palette with 30 colors. - 89 background style templates. - Drying functionality (fast dry, instant dry, adjustable natural dry). - Layers functionality (import image / color adjustment / move / rotate / scale / reverse left and right / white transparency / gradation effect). - Guide display (character guides / partition guides / grid guides). - Movable toolbar (top / bottom / left / right). - Canvas zoom (zoom in and out with pinch gestures). - Undo / redo (5 levels). - Export functionality (formats: JPEG, PNG, transparent PNG (no background)). - Support for Apple Pencil (1st and 2nd generation). - Support for 3D Touch (where available: iPhone 6S - XS). - Drawing tool selection (finger and stylus / stylus only). - Adjustable brush pressure sensitivity (5 levels, with supported stylus only). - Adjustable tilt sensitivity (5 levels, with supported stylus only). - Gesture functionality (pinch zoom and drag, zoom toggle with 2-finger tap). - 3D brush display (enable / disable). - Pointer display (enable / disable). - 5 levels of canvas resolution with a maximum of 3072 x 4096 pixels (the higher resolutions do not work on devices with lower specs).
Almost perfect for kanji practice
I’ve been using this app to practice writing kanji, and it had a lot of great features and the brush reacts very naturally. If I could add or change anything it would be instant erase. There is an animation that plays when you delete your drawing space that gets annoying and slows down practice. The delete key is also quite small and can be a difficult targets to hit. My workaround is to practice writing in water mode with fast drying, but adding a finger swipe to delete or a “black water” (disappearing ink) function would make it perfect to crank out hundreds of kanji. Also, the grid layer is nice, but even at the largest grid, to get a quadrant you need to zoom in. An extra large grid or paper background would be appreciated.
Much better when you increase the resolution.
At first I was perplexed as to why the brushes were so much more ‘mushy’ in 3 than in 2, until I realized the default canvas resolution in 3 is much smaller than in 2! Increasing from 768x1024 to 2400x3200 fixes the problem of the dithering being too large and immediately highlights the improvements of the brush engine in 3 over 2. I imagine the reason the default is so low is for better battery life / FPS on lower spec iPads. The user should be prompted to pick a resolution on first launch to make it more obvious that there are multiple quality modes.
Unique App + Support that delivers!
“ Greetings! I have to say “Thank you!” The quality of your support reply to my question(s) was just excellent! Now, along with your great Zen Brush 3 app, I must add that it is from a company that provides meaningful support to its customers! That’s a perfect combination. Keep it alive!” Sharing what I wrote back to PSOFT, the developer of this app. -Reg
Great app for ink painting and brush lettering
This app has beautiful brush dynamics and ink simulation, and when I reached out to the developers to report a small bug they responded right away and had a fix out in no time. Thanks!
LPLEASE FIX
I I really resent the intrusive. as for Zen brush 3 that makes zen brush 2 unyseable.
LPLEASE FIX
Introduce 472 Whitney Avenue #C2 on openingFIX zen brush 2.
Not recommended for apple pencil users
The app is optimized for fingers on touch screens. It does capture pressure/tilt of pencil, but does not apply them faithfully for ink simulation creating a very awkward feeling. With rapid strokes, ink lightens regardless how much pressure you apply, and the brush continues to shoot forward due to some sort of motion prediction. So it works fine only if you write at snail speed and totally breaks down as you speed up no good for cursive script. @app author, please offer a mode disabling finger heuristic/optimizations for pencil users.
Mar 6, 2024
Fixed an issue where the Apple Pencil hover position was not correctly reflected if the system's "Display Zoom" setting was changed.
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