There is a learning curve, like any Adobe product, but Fresco feels more approachable than many of its denser programs. You can also adjust whether or not your brush will refill itself As you paint your colors get less and less vibrant because there's less 'paint' on your brush. The paints behave like real paints, meshing together to create new colors which you can sample directly with your brush. There’s something meditative about mixing colors on the canvas rather than just picking values from a color wheel. You can blot your oil in one spot on your canvas and mix colors right there to find the perfect blend.

Oil painting on an iPad may seem heretical to purists but Fresco replicates the feel of painting with real oil and pigment in a way I haven't seen before. The solution is better software, and Adobe has something in the works that might fit the bill. They're small enough to fit anywhere you’d put a sketchbook, but sensitive and responsive enough to give even the best tablets a run for their money. It's frustrating because the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil should be a digital artist’s ideal companions.

Managing files, importing and exporting your work, adding new brushes-all of these routine tasks require app juggling to work right. But even the best art apps on iPadOS have some irritating quirks you wouldn’t have to deal with on a desktop or laptop. Just have a search through #ipadpro on Instagram and you’ll see what I mean. Good enough that dozens of professional artists of every stripe have ditched their old tablets in favor of the iPad Pro. The best among them, Procreate and Clip Studio, provide excellent art creation capabilities. Since the release of the original iPad Pro, dozens of professional drawing and illustration apps have found their way into the App Store. The iPad Pro and Apple Pencil is one of those hardware pairings that just inspires creativity. It got me to draw every day-something I hadn’t done since college, and I’m not alone.

Adobe fresco app store