10 reasons Infinite Painter is THE painting app for Android

With thoughtful design and a powerful toolset, Infinite Painter has become my go-to mobile app for digital drawing and painting… and it keeps getting better.

While Infinite Painter is available for iPadOS as well, it’s the Android version that gets the prioritized development. It’s thanks to this app (and devices like the Galaxy Tab S9FE used in this review) that I think the iPad isn’t the only obvious choice anymore for digital artists these days.

1. Intuitive and minimal interface

Good UI design is absolutely key on mobile devices. Some apps do this better than others, and Infinite Painter ranks right up there. What I really like here is that when I just want to grab my tablet and jump straight into sketching an idea, there is zero clutter between me and the tools I need for a simple task.

When it comes time to get serious though, an extra tap or two of the pen starts to unlock much more advanced tools.

2. Customize parts of the interface

Infinite Painter gives you the ability to slightly customize your interface by pinning your preferred tools to the top bar so that it’s quicker to access them. There are a ton of tools available, but for the most part you’re probably only going to be using a handful of them. Being able to surface them like this is a really nice touch.

Additionally, you can pin and scale your colour wheel, and move the main tool bar around to different edges.

3. Colour wheel options

Ok, perhaps this is a more minor feature, but I like that I can change the colour wheel from the usual square-inside-circle, and there are a few different options. I’m normally not too fussy with this but intend to go with the triangle.

There’s more though including HSB sliders, colour palettes, and a colour orb.

Lighting colour sphere for easy referencing

This is one of Infinite Painter’s unique features that will make colouring your objects a whole lot easier. You’ll be able to set a local colour, then then shadow and light colours. Once it’s set up, you can easily pick from the sphere.

4. Brushes feel natural

As a painter, I’m excited by the brushes available here. The lack of actual bristles aside, the default painting brushes feel far more natural than I’ve experienced on other mobile apps. There are canvas textures, wet paint and dilution settings, and a falloff of paint as you make your strokes and more.

5. Powerful brush engine

Infinite Painter’s brush engine is pretty impressive. There are more than enough settings to play around with to create your own interesting brushes. There’s a library of shapes and textures that you can pull from straight from inside the app, or you can import your own shapes.

Infinite Painter does not support ABR files, so you won’t be able to upload your downloaded Photoshop brushes.

6. Shape carving with lasso fills

In contrast to sketching or using broad brush strokes, you create an image by drawing out hard edge shapes with the lasso fill. This essentially bundles the lasso selection and bucket fill tools, and lets you create compositions and character silhouettes really quickly. Some artists, like Scott Flanders, use this lasso painting approach a lot and it’s pretty fascinating to watch.

7. Shapes that snap to perspective grids

Drawing in perspective is tricky for most artists and can take a lot of mental effort. With infinite painter, once you place a perspective grid, you can drop shapes down that snap to that perspective. Even after placing them, the shapes will scale evenly and maintain the perspective.

8. Gradient maps

I tend to start off my paintings in greyscale. Gradient maps are a fast way to bring color to those pieces later on. This lets you set a colour for your shadows, midtones, and highlights, and points in-between. If you haven’t used them before, read more about gradient maps over on the Muddy Colors blog.

9. Timelapse

Almost an expected feature now, being able to see the progression of your artwork through a timelapse video is valuable (for the artist) and fascinating for the viewer. With social media and human attention spans favoring video, it’s great to have this readily available once you finish a piece.

You can select different timelapse lengths starting at 15 seconds. When exporting, you also get some interesting info like the number of brush strokes, undos, and total distance traveled by your brush strokes.

10. Navigator window and multiple references

On mobile, using split screen or pasting reference images on your canvas is not ideal, even on larger displays like XPPEN Magic Drawing Pad. Infinite Painter lets you have not just one, but multiple floating reference images in view that you can easily show or hide as you need them. The only downside with the current design is that you can’t zoom into a reference image while keeping the current bounds. If you want to get a closer look at some details, you have to make the whole reference bigger. It’s not a big deal, but something I hope can be improved later.

You can colourpick from the images, and rotate or flip them as needed.

There’s a navigator window too. Even while zoomed in, I have a full view of the artwork. Switching it to greyscale makes it easier to check on the values of my painting.

If you’re an Android user, I definitely recommend Infinite Painter if you’re looking a high-quality digital art app. It’s not free, but at $10, it’s in line with similar apps and well worth it. Test the full version with a 7-day free trial (no card required).