iPastels

This app simulates many aspects of pastel painting, including soft pastels, oil pastels, pastel pencils, and realistic color blending using your finger right on the screen.
Perfect for creating beautiful works of art, but also for practising or for a quick sketch whenever and wherever you have a burst of inspiration.

Actual pastelists and other artists can try out ideas and compositions before starting on a new painting in real life.
Beginners will be able to practise and refine their skills, without the added cost of pastel sticks and specialty papers.

REALISTIC PASTEL SIMULATION
We calculate everything in real-time, instead of just dragging a simple ‘brush’ across the painting.
Each stroke interacts with what’s already there, as it would in real life.
The simulation is not meant to look good for only the first couple of strokes; it has to hold for an entire painting. Otherwise, what’s the point?

One of the most widely used techniques in pastel is to blend the colors into each other right on the paper, as part of the painting process.
This is fully supported in iPastels!
When painting with soft pastels, you can apply different colors and then use Smudge or the Cotton Swab to blend and smoothen the colors.
With oil pastels, the blending is mostly done by the pastel sticks themselves, but occasionally you may want to use Smudge or Cotton Swab for softening backgrounds and shadows.
You can also use pastel pencils for the initial sketch and for adding details, or for making full pencil drawings.

APPLE PENCIL SUPPORT
The strokes change characteristics depending on how you use the Pencil (pressure, tilt).
You can also opt to have different functionality for the Apple Pencil and your finger.
Go to 'Settings' -> 'Apple Pencil', and choose from the list of modes.
The most advanced mode lets your finger have a separate tool/color/etc when you select with your finger instead of the Pencil.
The simpler modes permanently assign a tool such as Smudge to the finger, which can be really useful in pastel painting!

PROPRIETARY PAINTING ENGINE
We have put years of research and hard work into making our own painting engine from scratch, and we continuously work to improve it.
The engine uses 128-bit color and it always utilizes floating-point arithmetic for increased accuracy and a high dynamic color range.

FULL SCREEN PAINTING
Use a 3-finger tap or shake the device to toggle full screen mode on/off.
(You can also flick the toolbar over to the opposite side.)

ZOOMING AND PANNING
Pinch to zoom in/out.
Drag with two fingers to pan.
A 2-finger tap will then reset the zoom/pan.

LAYERS
To open the Layer Control, use the button that has what looks like a stack of papers and a small symbol (e.g. a mountain) on it.
In the Layer Control, use the + button to add layers and the trash can button to delete.
You can temporarily toggle a layer on/off using the switch to the right.
Tap on the thumbnail to bring up a menu of layer options that includes an opacity slider.
To move a layer within the stack, drag it using the handle on its right-hand side (only visible if you have more than one layer).
You can also change the color of the paper, beneath the layer(s).

COLOR SETS
Tap on a color to select it. Tap again to bring up a menu where you can change or adjust the color in a number of ways.
Adjacent to the colors you will find buttons to switch between the different color sets.
Press a second time if you want to replace the color set with one of the default ones.

SEAMLESS PATTERN EDITING (PRO)
In addition to creating normal paintings, you can also make repeating patterns.
Switching on the Pattern Edit Mode will display your painting as tiles next to each other.
You're free to paint anywhere on these tiles, to easily create seamless patterns for use as website backgrounds, in print, or for textures in 3d modelling.

*Previously featured in the (print) magazine Pastel Journal.*