Zen Brush 3

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.

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.

“ 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

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!

I I really resent the intrusive. as for Zen brush 3 that makes zen brush 2 unyseable.

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.

The app is sooo smooth, it feels like butter. You slide your finger across the page, and you can almost feel the ink from the brush absorbing into the paper. You can add colored paint, change the brush sizes and opacities, but my favorite part is adding water. I’ve never seen it in any other art programs before, but you can add pure water onto the canvas with your finger and watch the ink bleed all over the paper. And the graphics, oh, the graphics, they look super realistic too. I wish the developers changed all the fonts so they would match the default Apple font, but the actual drawing tools and paper look extremely realistic. It reacts to water in real time, so you can watch the paper/ink dry, or dry it quicker with a button. You can also turn off drying completely, so the paper will stay wet. The app doesn’t give you any tutorials, so you slowly figure everything out as you go through the app. And honestly that approach makes the app better, because you keep finding new things by exploring! You can: - add photos - choose paper - choose 3D objects to draw on - add layers and move stuff around - change the size, opacity, and wetness of your brush - there’s 30 different colors and they all blend together nicely - there’s different shades of black so you can make grayscale drawings - it works with apple pencil - when you hold down your brush on the paper for a while, it’ll make an imprint/dent in the paper - when you tilt your device the whole background moves so it feels immersive - the ink and paper also responds when you tilt the device (reflections and such) - you can move the toolbar around - you can change the resolution to see every detail I wouldn’t recommend this app for serious drawings or sketches, as the actual brushes feel a bit laggy (on purpose). I’d recommend this app if you like to doodle, experiment with ink and water, or, as the app mainly focuses on, calligraphy.

This is no longer fun, or user friendly. No instructions, the first version was really great, but when I went to use it, was forced to up grade, that was another bad upgrade, so I deleted said app, then saw an add, went back to version 2, it then said I had to upgrade to three. Now it’s basically useless. Deleting again. Zero instructions, played for an hour just trying to get it to do what the original did. Just not even usable! I’d look else where. I’ve seriously never seen any developer actually ruin a good app to render it useless.

OK the papers on the right hand side with the Zen rotation I can and only the red brush gives you multiple colors if you hold onto it I guess or drag down from it and the eraser changes if you drag down to a bloody eraser which I don’t understand yet blatting not bloody whatever… And it looks like they erased my criticisms oh well from my previous review that’s OK what’s my one big issue… I try to do a circle and I get this lag or it goes into tilt mode or something and I get this weird straight lines on my curves and gestures that would be a dealbreaker for a real calligrapher artist! Once you buy the app it’s hard to tell how much you paid for unless you work and I’m lazy but I guess it must’ve been cheap enough if I bought it… Pretty good even if some of the 3-D backgrounds are pretty lame better to use a photo of your own of wood or something and this will be much better if you can get the texture going on with the paper and the dry brush is much better in the brush 2! Knouff said… said the Marvel comic guy…Stanley I just remembered… Stan Lee…

But fun to play with and an interesting thing to use for art block. Rules loosen the mind and make you think more creatively. So I’m impressed with how well it mimics traditional brushes. For line art you can import a sketch and pant it in. The colors are a great addition. The brush sizing bar needs some work and maybe add some cool special effect like salt to the paint, or liquid frisk. You could take this further by adding natural fabric backgrounds and melted wax to mimic batik silk painting since they traditionally use the same brushes. Don’t mind the art major rambling but it’s a mess free way to play with calligraphy brushes which run about $20-$30 per brush plush the solid ink sets with the grinding stone. This app is a fun time.