Growly Draw

Everyday drawing There are hundreds of painting and drawing apps on the App Store. This one is a bit different. It doesn’t want to grow up to be Photoshop, Illustrator, or Draw Anything the Next Generation. It’s not intended for professional artists. This is a drawing app for day-to-day use by people who don’t have a degree in graphic design. You can use it to create illustrations for reports, newsletters, blogs, or just to amuse your friends.

Shapes or pixels? Since the very first digital computer, there have been two basic types of images: vector graphics (you specify how a shape should be drawn but don’t worry about the details), and bitmaps, (also called rasters, you tweak any and every pixel). Growly Draw can handle both. A painting is one kind of shape, which consists of pixels you can edit individually or in swaths. Other shapes include rectangles and ellipses, polygons drawn with curved or straight edges, freehand scribbles, text, and lines. Lines can have simple or fancy arrows on either or both sides.

Shapes can be be rotated, reflected, and shadowed. Every shape has drawing options that you can change at any time, as you can see in the format panel on the right in the image above.

Some of the interesting things you can do with shapes include changing the thickness and color of the outline, and adding a fill color or a fill gradient (like the circle in the illustration). Polygons can be open or closed, curved or straight, and you can run text along the outline, as shown above — so text can flow on any kind of curve you can imagine. Polygons can be infinitely reshaped, point by point, for fine-tuning after they’re created.

A built-in shape library contains arrows, stars, clouds, and geometric shapes that you can resize and customize with your preferred colors.