Digital art is a wonderful way to create art and post it to social media. The challenging part, however, is deciding what program to use. Many programs cost a large amount of money for the app itself or are free on the app store with an additional expensive monthly/annually subscription. Sometimes, these apps can be extremely complicated to learn how to use for beginner artists. Ibispaint X is a great app for digital artists just beginning to explore the medium.
What is Ibispaint X, exactly? It is an app that can be accessed on all devices. There is a subscription that users can pay for, but there are many cool free features people can access without paying the $10 a month subscription.
Some of these free features include being able to make illustrations, comics and animations with unlimited frames. Ibispaint X includes tools like a reference page, lasso tool, thousands of brushes, erasers and 84 filters.
Everything is very neat and clean, making it perfect for beginners to try out. The icons for different tools are quite accessible and can be easy to find.
It is a free app for iPad and phone users. On PC, it is $4.50 monthly and $28 a year, which is a fairly reasonable price compared to a few other drawing apps.
A really cool feature of Ibispaint X is that it has its own social media page dedicated to the app where artists can show their art, animations and stories to others.
A con of Ibispaint is that it is truly designed to be a mobile app for tablets and iPads. Reviews state that the app runs smoother on a tablet compared to a computer.
How to use IbispaintX (the basics) :
When first signing into the app, something like this will appear. Below will be pictures of art people have drawn and posted. The list can change and vary depending on which art is in the top ten for the day. The My Gallery button will take the user to make their art. Online Gallery is the platform where others can share their art pieces.
This is what will be shown when My Gallery is pulled up. To create a new art piece, the user can click the plus and choose what size they prefer their art.
This is what the user is met with. In the bottom is a bar where various tools are. The buttons include (left to right): switching from pencil to eraser, the drawing tools, settings for the tool giving things like type, width, strength, and/or thickness to the brush or tool being used. Next is the color being used, a way to put away all the tools to give the user more space, the layers folder, and a way to either go back to the gallery or to save the piece to the device.
These are the various tools the user can select from. The tools given are the transform tool, which can scale and rotate the selected area; magic wand, which selects every object with a specific color; and a lasso which is an easy way to select a desired object. The next button is for filters, which can alter and change the layer to create cool effects.
The brush and eraser are quite easy to understand. A user draws with the brush tool and erases it with the eraser.
Smudging will mix two different colors while blur will blur an image and colors around it.
The special tool has many uses. It has the liquify pen which can make parts in an object shrink, expand, smoothen, or be dragged along in a controlled area. When using the lasso tool, a small bar will pop up with the thickness of the brush being used as well as a gear on the side. If the gear is clicked, then there will also be a black arrow to go to the various special tools that the user can use. A user will be led to the lasso fill and eraser, which fills or erases a selected spot that the user creates. It’s a quite useful tool and is often used by many artists.
There is the bucket which fills a closed area, the vector tool which allows a user to create lines without losing the quality of the art, and the text tool letting the user create words.
Lastly, there is the frame divider for when one wants to make a comic, an eyedropper which makes the current color the color the eyedropper is held over, and the canvas tool which allows the user to change the canvas size, rotate, or flip the canvas however the user prefers. (pic 4)
This is a small picture made out of all Ibispaint X using things like a lasso tool, circle maker, and bucket tool of a little person that is quite fun to draw.
Have fun creating. For further and simpler explanations on various tools and techniques, there is an entire page from the Ibispaint X creators of straight tutorials. As well as a large collection of YouTube tutorials from creators who use the app. 
