Sketching meets productivity with the Concepts app
Procreate may reign supreme on iOS for digital illustration, but Concepts has also managed to solidify its place as an effective sketching and productivity app. Concepts has a history of being used by professionals in a range of creative endeavors and the apps “projects” settings certainly allow it to be flexible in form and function. Unfortunately, sometimes streamlined functionality that works well for tablets and 2-in-1 devices does not always find a way to fit in with desktop devices where users can find the lack of options too limiting. Concepts falls into this category, sadly, where it is a lightweight app that can be useful for on the go, but if you’re looking to use it as a primary drawing app then you may be left wanting.
Concepts
Compatibility: Concepts is available on Windows 10 devices via the Microsoft Store.
Bottom line: Concepts has features that can make it incredibly useful for productivity, but from a digital artist’s standpoint it is pared down too much to be ideal beyond general sketching. Locking away even the most mundane features like importing your own images behind paywalls further serves to limit the app’s usefulness.
Highlights:
- Infinite canvas size
- Copic marker color matching
- Variety of digital paper types
Concepts: Price and availability
Source: Windows Central
To unlock all of Concepts’ features, you would need to pay $5 a month to “go pro” and unlock all of the limited features. There is also an annual subscription option that is heavily discounted at $30 for 12 months. Individual themed brush packs can be purchased for $2 each if you’d rather forgo a subscription, but purchasing brushes alone will still leave you limited on the feature front.
Concepts works across a variety of Windows devices that support touch functionality, as well as Windows 10 PCs and HoloLens.
Concepts: What’s good
Source: Windows Central
For someone looking to test out bullet journaling, for example, the dot paper layout can be utilized to create a digital journal for note keeping, to-do lists, and decorative doodling. These journal layouts could effectively be saved as is with the dot layout or as a transparent image so that they could be printed for use in a traditional journal. Concepts also provides grid layout papers, along with an actual perspective grid tool that can make it useful for sketching projects like floor plans or interior design layouts.
Source: Windows Central
Concepts’ color wheel doesn’t just feature Copic colors, the swatches are actually labeled to match their appropriate marker counterpart. One thing to keep in mind with this, while it is a perk, is that your monitor’s color accuracy can vary which may lead to slight differences in how Copic colors are displayed on your screen versus how they appear in real life.
Source: Windows Central
Touch support is heavily ingrained into Concepts with gestures being used for nearly every selection tool. It is beyond clear that Concepts was designed with touch interfaces in mind, and while it works well on touch-screen devices it does not translate quite as well to use on a desktop with a stylus.
Concepts: What’s not good
Source: Windows Central
Source: Windows Central
As nice as the inclusion of the Copic color wheel is, the absence of an infinite color palette or color mixer feature does not go unnoticed. With productivity in mind these may be fine to omit, but again if you are an illustrator or looking to create more painterly images then you will certainly struggle to get some desired effects. This is magnified by the absence of blending tools, even as paid brush add-ons. These really are just bare minimum features that anybody would expect in an application that centers itself around art productivity. Without them, Concepts doesn’t really lend itself to being an integral part of your workflow.
Concepts: Should you get it?
Source: Windows Central
If I were to recommend Concepts to anybody, it would be those focused on creative productivity over those who are interested in just creating art without it being tied to something like interior design, product development, or architecture. I would also be very adamant that you have a touch-enabled device, because trying to use Concepts without it will only lead to heartache.
Concepts: The bottom line
It is easy to get wrapped up in simply clicking the “Get” button and downloading Concepts for free, but because the application locks away so many of its basic features behind a subscription paywall what you’re truly getting is a modified free trial. The extent of that free trial’s limitations is dependent upon how you intend to the use the application itself. It is difficult to imagine, however, that anybody would be able to find themselves using Concepts in any capacity without eventually hitting one of its many roadblocks.
For all the good that Concepts has to offer — especially with that Copic color wheel — it ultimately boxes itself into a corner with its overall limitations. It’s difficult to justify a monthly or yearly subscription, even at a discount, for such limited illustrative software when there are a variety of other free drawing apps, like Krita and Fire Alpaca, that work just as well on tablets and 2-in-1 laptops as they do desktop systems without touch support.
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