Draw with simple tools
A small set of pens, sizes, and colours, so you start drawing instead of configuring brushes.
sketchbook app
A digital sketchbook app for iPhone & iPad
A sketchbook that fills up, page by page.
free to download · iPhone & iPad ✎
A sketchbook is not a single canvas — it is a book that accumulates. Nooka gives you pages to draw on, photos to draw over, and a book to keep them in, so a year of small sketches ends up as something you can flip through instead of a folder of exports.
What is a digital sketchbook app?
A digital sketchbook app gives you drawing tools and a book of pages rather than one canvas at a time. Nooka is a digital sketchbook app for iPad and iPhone: draw on blank pages or over imported photos, and keep the pages together in a book.
made in nooka
Sketchbook pages made in Nooka
Drawing on blank pages, over photos, and around cutouts.
why nooka
Draw, and keep what you drew.
Sketch over your own photos
Import a photo and draw on top of it — the fastest way to practise from reference.
Pages, not single canvases
Every sketch is a page in a book, so a year of small drawings adds up to something.
Works on iPad with Apple Pencil
Pressure-sensitive drawing on iPad, and finger drawing everywhere else.
step by step
How to keep a digital sketchbook
The habit matters more than the tooling. Small and frequent beats ambitious and abandoned.
Make one book and call it your sketchbook
One book, no theme. A dedicated sketchbook is easier to keep than sketches scattered across projects.
Set a small page size for yourself
Decide a sketch takes ten minutes, not an hour. The point is the number of pages by December.
Draw from what's in front of you
A mug, a plant, a hand, a corner of the room. Drawing from life beats drawing from imagination when you are building a habit.
Or import a photo and draw over it
Bring in one of your own photos and trace, redraw, or annotate it. Reference removes the blank-page problem entirely.
Add a page, don't perfect one
Move on rather than fixing. A sketchbook is a record of practice, and the bad pages are what make the good ones legible.
Digital sketchbook vs paper
Paper has the better surface and no undo, which is exactly why many people draw better on it — you commit to a line instead of retrying it.
Digital wins on availability. Your iPad is already with you, the tools never run out, and a bad page costs nothing, which makes starting easier.
The realistic answer is that most people who keep a digital sketchbook draw more often than they did on paper, and slightly less carefully. If quantity is what you are short of, that trade is worth it.
Drawing over your own photos
Importing a photo and drawing on top of it is the single most useful practice exercise a phone sketchbook enables.
Trace the big shapes first to learn proportion, then hide the photo and redraw from memory on the next page. The comparison is the lesson.
It also works for annotation rather than practice: sketching a plan over a photo of a room, marking up a garden, or drawing what a piece of furniture would look like in a space.
Why keep sketches in a book
Individual drawings exported to a camera roll disappear among photos, and you lose any sense of progress.
A book keeps them in order. Flipping from January to December is the clearest evidence of improvement most people ever get, and it is the reason paper sketchbooks are kept for decades.
It also lowers the stakes per page. A single drawing has to be good; a page in a sketchbook only has to exist.
Nooka is for you if
- You want a drawing habit more than a single finished piece
- You draw on an iPad, with or without an Apple Pencil
- You like sketching over your own reference photos
- You want your sketches kept in order, in a book
Look elsewhere if
- You need professional illustration tools — brush engines, vectors, animation
- You want layers-heavy digital painting; Nooka's drawing tools are deliberately simple
- You need Android or a desktop app
perfect for
Digital sketchbooksDaily drawingStudies from photosDoodles & letteringIdeas & thumbnails
questions
Sketchbook app FAQ
Is Nooka a good digital sketchbook app?+
Yes, if you want a book that fills up rather than a professional illustration tool. It gives you simple drawing tools, pages instead of single canvases, and a shelf to keep finished sketchbooks on.
Does it work with Apple Pencil?+
Yes, on iPad running iPadOS 17 or later. Finger drawing works everywhere, and no feature depends on having a Pencil.
Can I draw over a photo?+
Yes. Import one of your own photos and draw on top of it, which is the quickest way to practise from reference or to annotate something.
How much does the sketchbook app cost?+
The app is free to download, and drawing tools are available on the free tier. Creating more than one book or canvas, importing more than one photo per page, and layer editing are part of Nooka Pro. Current prices are on the pricing page.
Is this a replacement for Procreate?+
No. Procreate is a professional illustration app with a deep brush engine. Nooka's drawing tools are deliberately simple, and its advantage is the book — pages that accumulate on a shelf rather than separate canvases.
How many sketchbooks can I keep?+
As many books as your device has storage for. Most people keep one per year, or one for studies and one for finished pages.
Can I export a drawing?+
Yes. Export any page as an image to post, print, or send. Exports are ordinary image files with no watermark.
Does it work offline?+
Yes. Everything is drawn and stored on your device, so a plane or a park with no signal is a perfectly good place to sketch.
Do I need to be able to draw?+
No. Most pages in most sketchbooks are practice. Keeping the book is the skill; the drawing improves as a side effect of the pages piling up.
Full plan details are on the Nooka pricing page, and more help lives on support.