Apps for Artists / Resources & Tools For Artists Part 1

A few useful apps artists can use to show the work or to simplify the painting/drawing process

Over the last 4 years, I found some apps to be truly helpful while others are overpriced or complicating your work instead of simplifying it. Let’s have a look.

Apps for staging art

- Canva.

Yes! It has a mock-up section and a limited number of templates with walls and frames. But it can be absolutely free.

- Canvy.

Both free and paid subscriptions.

For free, you can still frame your art and download without a watermark but only in low and medium quality.

For some platforms like Saatchi Art, this wouldn't be enough, but for social media it can work.

I used this before FrameIT.

Which apps do you use? Let me know!

- FrameIT.

An Android app - my personal favorite!

It has a cheap plan for 3 months or a year, and it has even for free, lots of frames.

The feature I love the most is that when you upload art you can actually crop the image for better fitting. I haven't seen a cropping option (even though it seems super logical!) in other apps.

Attached pics made in the FrameIT app:

Spatial.io

*easier for desktop, on mobile requires the app, but it's free.

You can create your own free art exhibition or even a group exhibition on Spatial. Users can actually walk through the halls and look at your art.

Here is mine as an example (I didn't add any details for each painting I was just testing).

You can even host it and turn on your mic to greet people and talk about your art

There are alternatives to it also, Artris - it is like a gallery simulation where people can look at your art and most importantly - buy (commission was 8% earlier).

ArtPlacer

Universal paid tool for both visualizing your art on the wall and keeping your art inventory organized.

It has a virtual exhibition feature too and some practical things for the business side of art.

But no free plans. And if you want to use all the features it will be from $29/mo which is not very beginner-friendly.

To fight creative block

There is a website that can assign you a random color palette and you can challenge yourself to use it in a painting.

I’ve used it once for a collab, we both worked with the same color palette but in our different styles. My work looked like this:

Grids

To be honest I rarely use grids, as I’m not a figurative artist, and the ones I tried didn’t seem really easy to use or helpful.

This tool and this one seem to be very basic and you can adjust the number of columns/rows, or crop the image (in the second one).

Color Mixer

Golden has an excellent tool where you can get the exact formula to mix the colors you picked from a palette of your photo.

Me playing around with sky color from my Japan trip

They also have a downloadable color wheel (really detailed) poster here.

Video Editing

Well, we live in a reels-dominated world and most likely you have to make at least one in your life haha.

I have used for 3+ years InShot, it is basic but I like it or I am simply used to it.

But I know people use CapCut (free version) and are much happier with it. I downloaded it but honestly…I haven’t opened it yet. Is it that good?

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It will make me very happy if you will share any cool tools you use, if any!