Getting your art out there has never been easier than it is today. Just a few decades ago, people needed sophisticated tools and other expensive methods to show others their creative talent. Digital platforms have revolutionized this landscape and a lot of artists are getting recognized every day. However, if you’re looking for drawing apps for Mac, you can find a ton of options and it can be a little overwhelming.
In this article, we are going to streamline that list so that you can choose the best drawing app for you. Let’s jump into it.
Contents
- 1 10 Best Drawing Apps for Mac
- 2 19 Free Drawing Software For Macbook 2021
10 Best Drawing Apps for Mac
Jul 14, 2021 So, to cut your long chase short, here is a list of the 15 best free drawing software for Mac in 2021. Krita is a free open source drawing program that offers all the necessary tools to make a smashing art. Despite being free, Krita is a darling to most professional designers looking to create unique illustrations, comics, arts, and more.
- Price: Free Platforms: Mac, Windows, Linux Krita is a free open source digital painting program designed for cartoonists, illustrators, concept artists, and pretty much all digital artists. The software was initially developed as a general image editing competitor to Photoshop but focused their efforts on digital painting starting in 2009.
- Choose one of these free animation software, if you want to create a cartoon, video, infographic or 2D animation even without much experience. This list contains free animation programs for beginners and professionals, as well as top-notch 3D animation software that can be installed on Windows and Mac.
- The software listed above is some of the best free drawing programs one can download on their Mac systems. They tend to provide users with similar features which Adobe suite has to offer whereas in some cases free programs excel in the feature category as compared to the one present in Adobe suite.
- Platform: PC, Mac, Linux; Price: Free; Krita is a favorite drawing software among digital artists mainly because it’s completely free to use. In fact, Krita is the best free drawing software available today that receives regular updates. Krita is not as sophisticated as Clip Studio Paint and not as beginner-friendly as ProCreate either.
We have compiled a list of 8 best drawing apps for Mac that you can get today. The list is ranked based on which app we think is the best, but you can choose whichever app suits your art style.
1. Adobe Photoshop
What can I say about Adobe Photoshop that hasn’t been said already? Photoshop has been around for a long time and it gets new updates every year. It’s one of the most sophisticated drawing apps for Mac and will be a lot of help for a creator. You can create your own image and also edit other images to your liking. This software has a lot of love and support all over the world and it’s easy to understand why. There are a lot of videos online that’s going to help you learn Photoshop and there’s a large online community who’d be happy to help you. The newest version, Photoshop 2020, has an AI called Adobe Sensei that will help you get better selections.
Photoshop is great, but it is expensive. You will have to pay a subscription fee of $20.99/month if billed annually and you can do so here. So if you’re new to the creator scene, then I’d recommend checking out other entries.
2. Autodesk Sketchbook
If you want a professional drawing app with a lot of bells and whistles and if you want it for free, then Autodesk Sketchbook is for you. This app is so versatile and feature-rich that it will appeal to a lot of people. It has a minimalistic design and is preferred by a lot of content creators. There are over 140 brushes and you can even import brushes created by other artists. You can also get custom perspective guides among other things.
You can check out more features and download the app by clicking on this link.
3. Corel Painter
Corel Painter is an app that’s designed by creators for creators. It has a wide variety of tools you can use to propel your art to the next level. With over 900 brushes, this app is loved by many artists. Corel Painter also supports GPU acceleration so that you can get your work done much faster. Their website has hundreds of videos that will help you perform better.
Corel Painter costs $339.99 and there’s no subscription. You can download the app here.
4. Rebelle 3
If you are into realistic painting, then you will find Rebelle 3 appealing. It’s a unique app that uses realistic watercolor, acrylic paint simulations. The resulting image will look like it was made on paper with real colors and if this suits your art style, then you should definitely go for it. It makes the colors seem extremely realistic and you can even get simulated watercolor drops. This app was supposed to be an experimental software designed by Peter Blaškovič and it is popular among watercolor painters and CG artists.
You can check out Rebelle 3 and its features on its website. You can get Rebelle 3 for $89.99.
5. FireAlpaca
If you are new to digital drawing or if you have older Macs, then FireAlpaca should be a nice fit for you. It doesn’t have as many features as the earlier entries on the list, but that’s why it’s recommended to beginners. You won’t find the options overwhelming and you can worry about getting a more powerful Mac later on. It’s a small app that’s simple, easy and free to use.
You can check out the feature list of FireAlpaca on their website.
6. Preview
Preview comes pre-installed on a Mac and it can do much more than sign PDFs. If you want a simple drawing app for random doodles, the Preview should be good enough. You can open up any image on Preview and click on the Markup icon (pictured above) to access a lot more menus. It can help you doodle, make notes and even select shapes with the lasso tool. Since this is an in-built app, you don’t have to download anything.
7. Clip Studio Paint
If your dream is to become the best mangaka on Za Warudo!(means “the world” for all of my readers who are not JoJo fans), then you deserve a great manga illustrator. Clip Studio Paint is highly recommended if you draw a lot of manga panels. You can decide panel layouts and customize the tools for your art style pretty quickly. This drawing app for Mac also works great if you want to draw comics.
Clip Studio Paint is available for the free trial and you can get the standard version for $49.99. You can get the full-featured version for $219.99.
8. MediBang Paint
MediBang Paint, just like Clip Studio Paint is aimed at anime and comic-book artists. It has over 50 brushes and a large number of backgrounds that you can choose from. They have tons of tutorials for you on their website and you can snap grids and arrange the panels easily. This app is also available on iPhones and iPads. Medibang Paint is available for free and you can download it here.
Good Drawing Programs For Mac Free Downloads
9. Inkscape
Inkscape is an app that will appeal to a wide variety of creative people. It can help you create anything from sketches to website designs. It’s a versatile app that’s open-source and free to use. Inkscape also has a very helpful community that will help you use the app.
You can download Inkscape for free by clicking on this link.
10. Patina
Patina is another simple app that lets you create sketches to your heart’s content and simply moves everything else out of the way. It has a simple layout and it’s extremely simple to use. you can use it to make a lot of sketches and doodles on other images too. Patina has a lot of essential features but misses out on stuff like multiple layers. This app is, however, perfect for beginner artists.
Patina is a free app available on the App Store and you can download here.
19 Free Drawing Software For Macbook 2021
Here is the total list of top Drawing tools and Apps for your Macbook.
- Adobe Photoshop
- Autodesk Sketchbook
- Corel Painter
- Rebelle 3
- FireAlpaca
- Preview
- Clip Studio Paint
- MediBang Paint
- Inkscape
- Patina
- Adobe Illustrator
- Leonardo
- Affinity Designer
- Krita
- Tayasui Sketches
- Paintbrush
- Tayasui Sketches
- Sketch
- Sip
Final Take
These are some of the best drawing apps for Mac. I hope that this article was helpful to you. If you have any doubts or if we missed your favorite app, then please let us know in the comments section down below and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
Current Stable Version
The current stable release of GIMP is 2.10.28 (2021-09-14).
Pssst.. want to check out the GIMP 2.99.6 development release?
Get it on our development downloads page.
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Show downloads for GNU/Linux | OS X | Microsoft Windows | All
GIMP for Unix-like systems
If available, the official package from your Unix-like distribution is the recommended method of installing GIMP!
The flatpak build is new and has known limitations, though it will likely provide faster updates, following GIMP releases closely.
Therefore choose your installation medium according to your needs.
Flatpak build available in: x86-64 and AArch64 (note: i386 and ARM-32 versions used to be published, yet are now stuck at GIMP 2.10.14 and 2.10.22 respectively).
Flatpak additional instructions
The flatpak link above should open your software installer and prompt you to install GIMP. Mirror for roku app software from trial version. Yet it may not work out-of-the-box on some platforms since the flatpak technology is new. If that is the case, ensure flatpak is installed and if clicking the link still does not prompt to install GIMP, then manually install by command line:
flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakref
Once installed, it will be made available exactly the same way as other applications (menus, desktop overview, or any specific application launch process used by your desktop).
If this is not the case, we suggest to report a bug to your desktop or distribution asking for proper support of flatpak. In the meantime, you can still run it by command line (not as the recommended method, only a workaround):
flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP//stable
This installation will also provide regular update. You don't have to come back on this page and install again (it will not work!) when a new version of GIMP is released. Instead if your distribution and/or desktop has a good support for flatpak, it should propose to perform updates.
Once again, if your distribution does not have proper support, you can always fall back to using the following command line:
flatpak update
Systems without flatpak support
GIMP can also run on Solaris and is available for the BSD family of systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Please refer to the documentation for your Unix-like system on the installation of software.
GIMP for macOS
Note: the currently available package provides GIMP 2.10.24 and has not yet updated to the latest version, GIMP 2.10.28. We're working on that, please check back later.
The download links above will attempt to download GIMP from one of our trusted mirror servers. If the mirrors do not work or you would rather download directly from our server, you can get the direct download here.
Supported OS: macOS 10.9 Mavericks or over
Since the 2.8.2 version, GIMP runs on OSX natively. No X11 environment is required.
Native build
The official GIMP 2.10 DMG installer (linked above) is a stock GIMP build without any add-ons. Just open the downloaded DMG and drag and drop GIMP into your 'Applications' folder.
The SHA256 hash sum for gimp-2.10.24-x86_64.dmg is: d835afd64b4a617516a432a4ff78454594f5147786b4b900371a9fa68252567a
Check it on VirusTotal: gimp-2.10.24-x86_64.dmg
Older Downloads
Previous installers for OSX can be found here: download.gimp.org.
Macports
An easy way to compile and install GIMP and other great Free software on your Mac is by using Macports. The installer allows you to choose from a large directory of packages. To install gimp using Macports, you simply do sudo port install gimp once you have Macports installed.
Last we checked, the GIMP port file pointed to the current stable release and we have reports from people who've built GIMP successfully this way.
Homebrew
Homebrew is similar to Macports and provides packages (aka formulas) to install, either by compiling them from source or by using pre-made binaries. There are indications that there is now a formula for GIMP, installable with: brew tap homebrew/cask && brew install --cask gimp.
NOTE! Please be aware that it was announced recently that Homebrew is using analytics. To turn this off in homebrew then run: brew analytics off
You can read more about this on Brew Analytics.
Fink
Fink is a package repository that offer mostly precompiled binaries. It provides the apt-get command known to e.g. Debian and Ubuntu users, and installing GIMP is as easy as sudo apt-get install gimp once you have installed the Fink installer.
If there's no binary package, then fink install gimp will compile GIMP from source.
Disclaimer: we haven't been able to determine if it is possible to install or build recent GIMP from Fink. Last we checked, GIMP 2.6.12 appears to be the most recent GIMP package that is offered there.
GIMP for Windows
The download links above will attempt to download GIMP from one of our trusted mirror servers. If the mirrors do not work or you would rather download directly from our server, you can get the direct download here.
Supported OS: Windows 7 or over
These links download the official GIMP installer for Windows (~200 MB). The installer contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of GIMP, and will automatically use the appropriate one.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing system. It works by downloading GIMP from a distributed network of BitTorrent users, and may improve download speed dramatically. Choosing this option will download the torrent file for the GIMP installer. You may need to install a torrent client to make use of this file. Learn more..
Hash Sum
The SHA256 hash sum for gimp-2.10.28-setup.exe is: 2c2e081ce541682be1abdd8bc6df13768ad9482d68000b4a7a60c764d6cec74e
Check it on VirusTotal: gimp-2.10.28-setup.exe
Older Downloads
- Previous v2.10 installers for Windows can be found here: download.gimp.org.
- Previous v2.8 installers for Windows can be found here: download.gimp.org.
GIMP User Manual
These links download language-specific Windows installers for GIMP's local help. By default, they will place the help files with your GIMP installation.
Note: GIMP uses online help by default. If you want to use this local help offline, you will need to change GIMP's help settings.
- In GIMP, select [Edit] > [Preferences] > [Help System]
- For 'User manual', select 'Use a locally installed copy'
- Under 'Help Browser', you can choose between your system's web browser and GIMP's help browser plugin (if available).
See the online help for more settings.
- Chinese Simplified (39 MB)
- Catalan (40 MB)
- Danish (39 MB)
- Dutch (39 MB)
- English (39 MB)
- English (United Kingdom) (39 MB)
- Finnish (39 MB)
- French (41 MB)
- German (41 MB)
- Greek (38 MB)
- Italian (43 MB)
- Japanese (39 MB)
- Korean (40 MB)
- Norwegian Nynorsk (35 MB)
- Portuguese Brazilian (40 MB)
- Romanian (39 MB)
- Russian (40 MB)
- Spanish (40 MB)
Source for version 2.10 (Stable)
Drawing Software For Mac
GIMP releases available from gimp.org and its mirrors contain the source code and have to be compiled in order to be installed on your system.
For instructions, how to build GIMP from source code, please see this page.
GIMP 2.10.28 is now available at https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/v2.10/. You may want to read the Release Notes for GIMP 2.10.
To allow you to check the integrity of the tarballs, here are the hashes of the latest releases:
- gimp-2.10.28.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 4f4dc22cff1ab5f026feaa2ab55e05775b3a11e198186b47bdab79cbfa078826
- gimp-2.10.24.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- bd1bb762368c0dd3175cf05006812dd676949c3707e21f4e6857435cb435989e
- gimp-2.10.22.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 2db84b57f3778d80b3466d7c21a21d22e315c7b062de2883cbaaeda9a0f618bb
- gimp-2.10.20.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- e12f9f874b1a007c4277b60aa81e0b67330be7e6153e5749ead839b902fc7b3c
- gimp-2.10.18.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 65bfe111e8eebffd3dde3016ccb507f9948d2663d9497cb438d9bb609e11d716
- gimp-2.10.16.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- cbf9fe9534b913a9487b00cd9710cbc569bfd71fdd2f8c321547701a7d70cbeb
- gimp-2.10.14.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- df9b0f11c2078eea1de3ebc66529a5d3854c5e28636cd25a8dd077bd9d6ddc54
- gimp-2.10.12.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 7d80b58e0784120d57d327294f6a1fda281ff51a61935c2cd764da281acaac71
- gimp-2.10.10.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 12d1f243265c7aee1f2c6e97883a5c90ddc0b19b4346cf822e24adbb6c998c77
- gimp-2.10.8.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- d849c1cf35244938ae82e521b92b720ab48b8e9ed092d5de92c2464ef5244b9b
- gimp-2.10.6.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 4ec8071f828e918384cf7bc7d1219210467c84655123f802bc55a8bf2415101f
- gimp-2.10.4.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- ffb0768de14a2631b3d7ed71f283731441a1b48461766c23f0574dce0706f192
- gimp-2.10.2.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 1cb0baaecdefe44d371a15f2739a1bcbce4682336b4ccf8eb7b587ce52c333eb
- gimp-2.10.0.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 7fcc96fb88cb0a0595d2610f63a15dec245bb37bf9db527d37a24fb75e547de2
GIMP help files are available at https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/help/.
Please consider using one of the mirrors listed below.
Development snapshots
We now have a separate page for development versions of GIMP.
Want to check out the GIMP 2.99.6 development release?
Get it on our development downloads page.
FTP and Web Mirrors
We had a server move a while back that caused us to lose our existing mirrors (moved from physical to virtual server and to an environment that doesn't allow FTP access). On the plus side, we are now able to offer rsync access to download.gimp.org.
If you are running one of the existing GIMP mirrors, or want to create a new one, please contact us to get your rsync credentials.
Drawing Program For Mac Free
- Canada
- https://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/
- rsync://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/
- Finland
- https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/
- ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/
- rsync://rsync.nic.funet.fi/ftp/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/
- France
- http://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/
- rsync://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/
- Germany
- https://ftp.fau.de/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.fau.de/gimp/gimp/
- rsync://ftp.fau.de/gimp/
- https://artfiles.org/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/grafik/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/grafik/gimp/
- Greece
- https://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/gimp/
- Japan
- http://www.ring.gr.jp/pub/graphics/gimp/
- Netherlands
- https://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/gimp/gimp/
- Philippines
- http://mirror.rise.ph/gimp/
- ftp://mirror.rise.ph/gimp/
- Poland
- https://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/
- rsync://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/
- gopher://ftp.icm.edu.pl/1/pub/graphics/gimp/
- Sweden
- https://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp
- rsync://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp
- Ukraine
- https://gimp.ip-connect.info/gimp/
- rsync://gimp.ip-connect.info/gimp/
- ftp://gimp.ip-connect.info/mirror/gimp/
- United Kingdom
- https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- rsync://rsync.mirrorservice.org/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- https://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- ftp://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- rsync://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- United States
- http://gimp.cp-dev.com/
- ftp://devhost.cp-dev.com/gimp
- rsync://gimp.cp-dev.com/gimp
- https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/
- rsync://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/
- https://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/
- rsync://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/
- https://mirror.jaleco.com/gimp/gimp/
- https://mirror.umd.edu/gimp/gimp/
- https://mirrors.xmission.com/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://mirrors.xmission.com/gimp/gimp/