Grab your stylus and sketch away.

Steve Jobs dissed the stylus when he introduced the iPhone, but digital artists know nothing beats a stylus and tablet for drawing on your Mac. Trouble is, the lag between what happens on your tablet and what ends up onscreen can force you to alter your drawing style for the computer. TabletDraw aims to change all that.

mooSoftware’s TabletDraw is a bitmap drawing application that nails the feel of pen-and-paper sketching. Drawing produces lively, natural lines that vary with stylus pressure and speed. And yes, you can be speedy—even in high-resolution images, TabletDraw reproduces fast strokes accurately. Once you get going, it’s easy to forget the application and just concentrate on your artwork. Keyboard shortcuts abound; and if you run into snags, thorough documentation is available online and from the Help menu.

TabletDraw’s interface is streamlined, giving you only a few windows to worry about. The Tools palette has the pen, eraser, and selection tools you expect, as well as tools that let you easily drag, rotate, and zoom in and out with the stylus. Unfortunately, the Selection tool is rectangular only—freehand and polygonal options are sorely missed. The Pen tool is the only way to lay down color too—no paint buckets here—so filling in large areas can be tedious. The developers consider bucketless color a good thing, but the option to use it would be nice. The Tools Presets window lets you create new pens and erasers by tweaking settings, such as line width or pen color and opacity.

If you’re short on inspiration, you can import an image to trace, but you’ll have to reload it every time you open your drawing. That gets old fast, and unfortunately it’s the closest TabletDraw comes to multiple layers. A Seal Canvas function “seals” a drawing’s state to allow for nondestructive revisions, but it’s no substitute for layers, even with unlimited undos. Adding flexibility is an optional Ink Mode, which recognizes dark colors and draws light colors behind them. This feature is great for adding color to sketches drawn in solid black, but other colors blend the way markers do when they overlap—whether you want them to or not. These limitations both encourage and stifle experimentation...and left us longing for the power of more robust image editors. Fortunately, you can export TabletDraw creations into a variety of formats.