Essential drawing app for Mac
May 26, 2020 Preview — the default Mac app for opening images, PDFs, and other files — comes with a few editing tools. You can draw in a similar fashion to Microsoft’s Paint, and you can add text boxes.
Free Drawing Apps Mac Os X
Macs have always been known as creative machines for creative people. It’s likely the reason you actually bought one! So naturally Macs offer a wide variety of opportunities for you to express yourself, whether that’s building apps, writing prose, or drawing.
Having a good drawing app for Mac is priceless. Retina screens, accurate touchpads, and native support for a variety of inputs make sketching on Mac a pleasure. But with so many drawing programs to choose from, how do you pick the right one? Welcome to the no-sweat guide to the best free drawing software for Mac!
Best drawing, design, and editing apps
With Setapp, you don’t have to choose only one — get a large choice of the best drawing software to support your creativity flow.
The Best Drawing Programs On Mac Today
It’s not easy to pinpoint the best drawing app for Mac. Is it one of the free drawing programs? Is it made for simple drawings or lets you paint on Mac beautifully? The level of skill has to be considered as well.
The collection of drawing apps below features something that appeals to everyone, from the Mac equivalent of Paint you can find on Windows to a simple drawing pad for Mac to the likes of Sketch software that can be used by professional designers too.
Communicate with the markup feature in Preview
Drawing Apps For Mac Os
If you just want to do a rough sketch for Mac or a few simple drawings, you don’t necessarily need to go about downloading lots of drawing apps, you can just use a drawing app for Mac you’ve already got — Preview.
While most of us think of Preview as an image or PDF viewer, it’s also packs a basic toolset for annotating, drawing, and sketching. To see what you can do with Preview:
Open an image, document, or just a white sheet in Preview
Click Show Markup Toolbar in its top menu
From here you can choose tools, shapes, colors, thickness, type, and more to make necessary adjustments or create something completely new
Save and share your image
For those who don’t intend to draw complicated scenes, Preview might just might be enough. For everyone else, there are, of course, more powerful third-party apps.
Get nostalgic with Paintbrush
Lots of us remember the simplicity and versatility of Microsoft Paint. Macs used to have a similar app too called MacPaint (that’s been discontinued). Well, good news is some enthusiastic developers took the matter into their own hands and essentially recreated a Paint app for Mac — Paintbrush.
This Mac equivalent of Paint will strike you as a complete duplicate of that old software you used to love. It features all the same tools, including rectangular and oval shapes, paint bucket, pencil, spray, lines, etc. You can also easily switch and add colors to your palette as you go.
Make professional mockups with Sketch
Free Basic Drawing App Mac Download
If you’ve already outgrown simple drawings you can do with Preview and Paintbrush, and want to move higher — try Sketch.
Sketch took the world by storm just a few years ago, when they essentially introduced a viable alternative to complex apps like Adobe Illustrator and targeted it specifically to digital design professionals.
Free Basic Drawing App Mac Free
Everything you do in the Sketch program is done in vector, which means all shapes are infinitely resizable, in contrast to the raster graphics of Paintbrush. With Sketch for Mac, you can design high-fidelity mockups for your website, prototype your iOS app, or just create complex illustrations.
You can download and try the Sketch software for free, but after a month, you'll be required to pay the annual license fee, which is a big downside if you don’t plan to use the app regularly. In addition, Sketch for Mac is not the most accessible app for beginners and it’s not exactly a drawing app for Mac due to its vector nature.
Create digital art with MediBang Paint Pro
Perhaps an equivalent of Sketch, but in raster graphics, is MediBang Paint Pro. This drawing software for Mac allows you to execute your dreams beautifully with over 50 custom brushes as well as its extensive support for layers and fonts.
Originally developed for comic creators, MediBang Paint Pro got quickly adopted by everyone looking for a versatile drawing pad for Mac and is hailed by many as the best free drawing software around. However, since it was built for the purpose of creating comics, you might face a few problems adapting it to your needs — it’s definitely one quirky drawing app for Mac. Another issue is the app’s slow update release cycle. For example, macOS Catalina users aren’t able to launch the app in the fall of 2019 due to lack of security updates from the developers.
Set your imagination free with Tayasui Sketches
Talking about the best drawing programs, it’s simply impossible to avoid Tayasui Sketches. This intuitive sketch program is universally loved by painters, designers, illustrators, and art aficionados alike.
Ultimate drawing app for Mac
Draw on your Mac’s screen like on canvas with Tayasui Sketches. Mix colors and experiment with limitless layers!
Tayasui Sketches makes it easy to bring what you have in mind to reality with its support for unlimited layers, infinite undos, smart rules, and a wide variety of drawing tools. If you want to paint on Mac, nothing else comes close to representing the physical experience of applying colors to paper than this drawing software for Mac.
To start your drawing pad for Mac with Tayasui Sketches:
Open a new document
Try out all the different tools from the sidebar, from a fine pen to an airbrush
Use supporting menus to modify your currently selected tool and mix just the right color
Drawing Apps For Mac Free
With just a bit of practice, you’ll see why Tayasui Sketches beats all the free drawing programs out there. Time for your digital painting skills to skyrocket!
Save all the cool colors with Sip
Regardless of the drawing software for Mac you choose to use in the end, one of the most difficult things to do is going to be finding the right colors out there. Sometimes, you might come across a beautiful color you might use in the future, but where do you save it? Sip.
Sip is the most intuitive, handy, and non-intrusive palette organizer available for Mac. This little utility lives in your Mac’s menu bar, where it saves all the colors you like and simultaneously features a tiny color picker on the side of your screen, which makes Sip instantly available in any sketch program for Mac, like Tayasui Sketches, for example.
By now, you should be well-equipped to start on your Mac drawing journey, using the selection of the drawing software for Mac listed above, whether it’s a simple annotation or a large-scale digital painting.
Best of all, you can try Tayasui Sketches and Sip for free by signing up for a free seven-day trial on Setapp, a platform for more than 160 unique creative Mac apps that literally help you bring your dreams to reality. Why wait, check it out now!
Creating mechanical parts and assembling them with drawing sheets may get time consuming and complex. Mechanical drawing software is designed to help the draftsman to get the mechanical draft designed efficiently within a short time. You can expect the software with pre-defined entities to get the design quickly. Following is the list of few of the best picked mechanical drawing software.
Related:
Mechanical Drawing Software
This software from Smartdraw LLC is fast, easy to use software capable of running on any device. Simply open a template, SmartDraw provides thousands of lines, shapes, and symbols, click and place them into place, lines and text. The software is web-based; you can create the mechanical schematics online using your computer, or mobile device. The key features include quick start templates, sharing your design, exhaustive symbol library, and automatic formatting.
Free 3D CAD Direct Modeling Software
This Creo elements from PTC is very simply designed yet powerful mechanical drawing software. This software if the free version of the Creo 19.0 You can create and modify your drawings in real-time. The software also allows you to directly work with cut and paste, push and pull, and drag and drop techniques. The software is perfect for engineers looking for fast, lightweight and flexible direct 3D software, plus you can upgrade to the premium software when your design challenges grow.
AutoCAD Mechanical
AutoCAD is mechanical design and drafting software from AutoDesk, with libraries of standard-based parts and tools for automating common mechanical CAD tasks for accelerating your design process. The software is free for download and use with the educational version. The key features of the software include smart centerlines and center marks, resizable dialogue boxes, enhanced PDFs, smart dimensioning, and refined interface.
AutoQ3D for Android
AutoQ3D is the mechanical design software specifically designed for the Android platform users. The software lets you create, edit and share rapid models using any android device. The key features of the software include convenient and intuitive workspace, modification tools, snapping tools, grouping tools, and misc tools. The software comes with stylus pen support, openGL and multiple devices support.
EazyDraw for Mac
EasyDraw is the mechanical drawing software for the Mac platform users. The software includes comprehensive support for bitmap and vector graphics format: import and un-group for pdf and EPS. You can also exchange scaled CAD drawing using DXF. EasyDraw has a large set of pre-defined geometries and also lets you create your own geometry. You can get a free demo before purchasing the software.
Mechanical Drawings for Windows
Mechanical Drawings from Delta Software International LLC is the mechanical design software developed specifically for Windows platform users. CAD Pro includes almost all the functionalities of the more priced competitors; including comprehensive libraries and tools for automating common mechanical drawing tasks. You can quickly add symbols and connect them with the snapping tools. The software offers to export the drawing to MS-Office or PDF formats.
Most Popular Mechanical Drawing Software – ZWCAD Mechanical
ZWCAD Mechanical is the most popular software in the mechanical design software category. The software offers abundant tools such as shaft generator, tolerance dimension, surface texture symbol, balloon and BOM and standard parts for Mechanical sheet drawings in 2D. The software has international and Enterprise standard support with ISO, ANSI, and GB drawings. ZWCAD has a huge library of predefined parts along with shafts and gear generator utility. You can also see 3D Piping Software
How to Install Mechanical Drawing Software?
Many of the Mechanical drawing software listed above offer a setup file, allowing an easy installation of the software. Few of the software in this category are web-based, giving you access from anywhere with just one requirement of internet connectivity. Mechanical design software is basically designed to give you a simple and easy GUI to create the drawing easily and quickly. 3D Drawing Software
While some software in this category offer free service for the basic need of mechanical drawing, the number of features gets limited for the free version. If you are looking for fully featured software, the paid ones are for you. Each software offering some unique feature over others, it’s the question of personal preferences for selecting one of the best software listed here.