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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Best iPad apps for unleashing and exploring your creativity
There are a number of iPad apps that can help you explore and express your creativity. Although the iPad started off as a simple device that could be used to stream content or browse the web on the go, Apple has essentially turned its iPads into powerful machines that can be used to do things like create digital art and edit videos. We've compiled a list of some of the best iPad apps for creativity that are available on the App Store. Before we get into the list, it's worth noting that although Adobe's creative apps are often top choices for creativity on the iPad, this list won't include them because they are already quite well-known. The list will instead focus on somewhat lesser-known apps. Procreate is one of the most popular drawing apps for the iPad, and for good reason. The app lets you create digital paintings, sketches, and illustrations using dozens of different types of brushes. Procreate is easy to use and features built-in gesture controls, along with a simple interface. The app allows for high-resolution canvases up to 16K by 8K on compatible iPad Pros. It also lets you create storyboards, GIFs, animatics, and simple animations. Plus, you can import image files such as JPG, PNG, and TIFF. Procreate includes several features that are designed to help you during the creative process on your iPad, such as QuickShape, StreamLine, Drawing Assist, and ColorDrop. Once you're finished creating your piece, you can relive your creative journey with the app's time-lapse 'Replay' feature and share a 30-second time-lapse video on social media. You can access Procreate with a one-time payment of $12.99. LumaFusion is a great app for editing videos if you're ready to graduate from iMovie. The app features numerous user-friendly features that make it perfect for aspiring videographers or indie filmmakers on a budget. With LumaFusion, you can create multiple layer edits with 4K ProRes and HDR media. You can add different effects, choose from dozens of transitions, and record voice-overs. The app lets you create multilayer titles and import fonts and graphics. Plus, you can fine-tune audio with Graphic EQ, Parametric EQ, Voice isolation, and more. The app lets you create projects with a variety of aspect ratios, including 16:9 landscape, 9:16 portrait, square, widescreen film, anamorphic, and more. LumaFusion is available for a one-time payment of $29.99. You can also purchase additional features, such as multicam editing and the ability to send your project to Final Cut Pro for Mac. Canva offers a user-friendly platform that allows anyone to create visual content, even without graphic design experience. You can use it to create presentations, infographics, videos, websites, social media posts, and more with over 250,000 templates. Canva features tools for editing photos, personalizing content with logos and images, adding audio, and cropping and speeding up video. The platform also has a series of AI features that are designed to make the creation process easier. For instance, you can extend an image using 'Magic Switch' or turn ideas into images with 'Magic Media.' Canva is free but offers a $12.99 monthly subscription if you want unlimited access to its AI features, premium templates, and more. Affinity Designer 2 is a graphic design app that combines vector design, pixel-based textures, and retouching into a single platform. It's great for professional illustrators, web designers, game developers, and other creatives. The app lets you create illustrations, branding, logos, icons, UI/UX designs, typography, posters, labels, fliers, stickers, concept art, digital art, and more. It supports Apple Pencil's precision, pressure sensitivity, and tilt functionality. Affinity Designer 2 features gesture controls to speed up your workflow, and it lets you customize keyboard shortcuts. You can also do things like create your own custom font and zoom to over 1,000,000% for absolute precision. You can access the app through a one-time payment of $18.49. Concepts is a great app for exploring your ideas and experimenting with designs. You can use the app to sketch plans, make notes and mindmaps, and draw storyboards and designs. The app features Nudge, Slice, and Select tools that allow you to easily change any element of your sketch without redrawing it. The app features realistic pens, pencils, and brushes that flow with pressure and tilt. Concepts gives you access to scale and measurement tools that calculate real-world dimensions, and also features a tool wheel or bar that you can personalize to your liking. The app's basic features are free. Concepts offers a $4.99 monthly subscription if you want access to additional features, such as the ability to create your own brushes and premium editing tools. Tayasui Sketches is a good, user-friendly sketching and drawing app. It has several different features such as a realistic watercolor brush, digital acrylic brushes, the ability to blend two colors to get the perfect shade, gradient and depth tools, and more. The app lets you multitask by opening up another app and dragging lawyers and documents between the two. There's also a 'Zen Mode' that lets you create without distractions. You can also upload your images to incorporate them into your creations. Tayasui Sketches lets you store your creations into personalized folders. Tayasui Sketches's basic features are free. The app offers a $2.99 monthly subscription that unlocks unlimited layers, new brushes and markers, an extended brush editor, the ability to backup your drawings, and more. This story originally published in December 2024 and is updated regularly with new information.


CTV News
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
New Manitoulin exhibition celebrates northern Ontario's beauty
A new exhibition celebrating Northern Ontario's landscapes opens this week at Perivale Gallery in Spring Bay on Manitoulin Island. Visitors can vote for a People's Choice Award winner. The show runs alongside the LaCloche Art Show, with the gallery open seven days a week.


Washington Post
23-06-2025
- General
- Washington Post
Arnaldo Pomodoro, whose bronze spheres decorate prominent public spaces around the world, dies at 98
ROME — Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy's most prominent contemporary artists whose bronze spheres decorate iconic public spaces from the Vatican to the United Nations, has died at age 98, his foundation said Monday. Pomodoro died at home in Milan on Sunday, the eve of his 99th birthday, according to a statement from Carlotta Montebello, director general of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation.


CBC
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
See a Winnipeg artist make detailed portraits with duct tape
Duct tape is often used to make quick repairs, but one Winnipegger has gotten stuck on another use. Levi Sobering creates intricate portraits with layers of coloured duct tape.


The Guardian
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Save the chicken-wire Mr Darcy! The push to preserve the fantastical works of ‘Wigan's Gaudi'
Kevin Duffy's fairytale was born on a dumping ground. Nobody else could see it, but to him, the overgrown remains of a 1920s bowling green promised untold potential. It was there he spent the last decades of his life creating castles, characters, and crude Tudor facades from chicken wire, cement, and anything else he could salvage, across the land surrounding his Wigan bungalow, spilling over into the family garden centre. Not many people have heard of Duffy – who died in September at 79 – or his work, all housed at his now-closed family business, Rectory Nurseries. But first reactions are often the same: bewilderment followed by unbound wonder and curiosity. After four decades, Duffy's kingdom is full of nooks and pathways, chapels and dens, monsters and myths – each discovery promising another just around the corner. The Rectory features not just its own miniature pub, but a lion's den as well as a stalactite-encrusted cave of sirens. One section hosts a small Tudor village, another a crowded antique shop where none of the items are for sale. It's like wandering into a theme park. Iain Jackson, a writer and architect who interviewed Duffy for an outsider art publication called Raw Vision in 2008, admits Duffy's work couldn't be shown in a gallery, but says, 'he still did it; he still had something to say – he was the real deal'. Yet along with his legacy as a much-loved outsider artist, Duffy has left a 1,200 sq foot property full of sculptures, found objects and oddities that nobody is quite sure what to do with. The land that the Rectory sits on is being forced into a sale, leading many locals to ask why Duffy's work can't be given protection. An idiosyncratic ground-floor rented flat in Birkenhead known as Ron's Place became what was thought to be the first outsider art to get Grade II-listed status last year. But today the Rectory lies stagnant; the gates closed to the public, as vines and trees encroach the Renaissance follies like a post-apocalyptic Portmeirion. 'Eccentric' is the word Duffy's nephew Chris uses to describe him. Duffy variously performed in a husband-and-wife musical duo, worked in a cotton mill, had an encyclopedic knowledge of gardening, and played the left-handed banjo. In the evenings when his family gathered, wearing his cowboy's neckerchief, he would drink and play music long into the night, outpacing even his most spirited nephews. His eldest sister, Sheila, says he had been a charismatic child, but other than an appreciation for architecture, he wasn't an obviously creative type. Instead, Duffy grew up to be a grafter, his hands tough like old leather. In around 1978 he started leasing the ground for £1 a year and cleaning it up, eventually building his bungalow in 1991, while selling cuttings for plants and slowly building up his nursery business. Duffy – who has sometimes been called 'Wigan's Gaudi' by visitors to the site – only started making art after Boxing Day in 1994, when his wife, Pat, died suddenly. A stone monument was erected in the garden in her memory, and decades of unrelenting creativity followed. Grief and remembrance feel enshrined in the Rectory. The all-faith chapel – which was originally built tongue-in-cheek from old lavatory bricks with an altar made of scaffolding planks – became a genuine place of reverence and, judging by the amount of touching prayer messages pinned up, was giving the 17th-century Holy Trinity church down the road a run for its money. Duffy's works weren't built to stand as individual pieces – instead he used his home-cum-garden centre as an ever-changing exhibition that people, and mostly himself, could enjoy. Layer after layer of strange objects created a magnum opus in over a hundred intertwined sections: a hand-sculpted Mr Darcy; the gravestone of a 58-year-old donkey; a shrine to his late wife and only son Carl, who died aged 56 in 2023. The creations were tied to whatever materials were freely available (or donated) at a given moment. Like the seedlings that fuelled his business, Duffy had a knack for creating something from nothing – 'building a lot without buying a thing' as he put it. He once said in a video made about him: 'Is it art or is it just a pile of rubbish?' Regardless of the answer, Duffy's wonderland may yet end up in the bin, and his work is just the latest in a long history of outsider art under threat. From paintings mistaken for trash to artworks being saved from skips and ending up in the Saatchi, the preservation of outsider art often depends on the taste and perseverance of a tenacious few. The loss of its creator looms over the Rectory. 'The fact that Kevin is no longer with us is hard enough,' says Sheila, 'but having to sell all his years of work just as a commercial venture is very sad.' The family, who don't own the land, hope that someone will buy the property and keep at least some of Kevin's work. Ideally they'd like it all preserved, but they're being realistic. After all, as Chris explains, perfection and preservation was never his uncle's goal. In fact, Duffy enjoyed the look of ivy creeping across his faux battlements, which undoubtedly inflicted structural damage over the years. His bottomless reserves of energy meant the layout of the Rectory could change on a whim of creative inspiration. A greenhouse easily became a village, a potting shed became a chapel. Without Duffy, the Rectory is still changing, as nature begins to reclaim it. Conifers invade the boundaries and ivy multiplies, while sculptures gradually forget their painted colours. It's a stark reminder of time's passing, and photos from 10 years ago show a tidier, prouder environment. To some, a bid to conserve Duffy's visionary environment may be a folly of its own. 'I don't think we have to preserve absolutely everything,' says Jackson. 'It existed for a moment. And those people that saw it had the luck and the privilege and that authenticity. There's a risk of it becoming museum-ified.' But Chris is hopeful about his uncle's legacy, even so. 'No matter what happens to the garden in the future, our Kevin has left his own unique mark on the world and the pictures and memories will be forever.'