Paper: Sketch, Draw & Create

Sketching, painting and collage on pages filed into journals, with gestures replacing most of the menus. Paper is for thinking on the page: quick notes, mood boards, storyboarding and rough concepts, not finished illustration. Several photos can share a page, and you cut, move and layer them without a layers panel.

The drawing tools favour loose, fast marks over pixel precision. Because journals sync, a sketch begun on a phone can carry on from a tablet. The base app costs nothing; Paper Pro, a subscription toggled in Settings, adds tools, features and journals. The developer is Evernote Corporation.

A page opens, a thought gets drawn, the page is swiped into a journal and forgotten until the next time it is useful. That is the loop. A mood board session means dropping in a handful of photos, slicing them up with gestures and arranging the fragments, often in a few minutes.

On a tablet it becomes a more deliberate sketchbook for storyboards or diagrams, and the sync means the phone version is always there to capture a thought away from the desk. Nobody uses it to finish artwork, and it does not pretend to be for that.

People search for it when they want a digital sketchbook that behaves like paper rather than like Photoshop. The gesture-first interface and the absence of layer panels appeal to designers and planners who think visually and find full drawing apps slow for rough work. The free core keeps it accessible.

Four screenshots suggest a focused presentation: probably a page in progress, a journal shelf, a collage and the tool tray. Paper has a long-standing reputation for a tactile, skeuomorphic look where journals resemble physical notebooks and tools sit in a tray at the bottom. It is one of the few apps where the interface itself is part of the appeal.

Version 5.5.10 marks a fifth major release with ongoing patches. Evernote Corporation is a sizable company, though Paper is not its main product, which is worth bearing in mind. A 4.6 rating from 10K+ reviewers is solid. The App Store is the sole store linked on this page.

Rated 4+ and free. Paper Pro is a subscription that opens up extra tools and journals, and the description does not state its price. Sync between devices implies an account, and syncing needs a connection, though drawing itself should work offline.

Storage will grow with image-heavy journals. The listing does not mention ads, and there is no indication of regional limits.