Tayasui Sketches Pro for Mac

Start: a pencil line and an arc ruler

Opened on a grey canvas, the tool picker sits along the left edge. The pencil responds with a slightly textured stroke — enough bite to feel like paper, without lag. For the first pass I want a curved horizon, so I switch on the arc ruler from the Pro set. The line snaps to the guide, perfectly smooth, and I lay down a faint green wash beneath it. A colour palette holds the three tones I will reuse: ochre, deep teal, and a dusty pink for light.

Build: layers, merge and smudge

The layer panel now supports groups, which changes the rhythm of building a sketch. I place rough vegetation on one layer, a figure on another, and tuck both inside a folder labelled Foreground. The smudge tool softens the edge of a shadow without blurring it into mud — a controlled drag pulls pigment sideways, leaving the paper texture visible. When the silhouette reads well, I merge the figure and its shadow layer to keep the stack tidy, then reorder the group below a wash of sky.

Toolbar visibility: keep your strip on screen for tablet work

A few preferences make an immediate difference to how the app behaves under the hand. Open Sketches Pro > Settings and disable Auto-hide toolbar if you work with a tablet: keeping the tool strip visible removes a small but persistent pause while the pointer hunts for the edge of the screen. Under Stylus, I set pressure curve to a slightly firmer right-hand bias — the default felt a fraction too sensitive on a Wacom Intuos, triggering full opacity with a light touch. If you work on a MacBook display rather than an external monitor, turning on Retina canvas is worth the extra memory: line edges stay crisp at 200 % zoom, which matters when inking small details.

Daily feel: speed, stability and resource use

Version 36.8 on an Apple Silicon Mac is composed in everyday use. Launch time is under two seconds, and a canvas with twelve layers at 4 000 by 3 000 pixels scrolls and rotates without stutter. Memory climbs gradually — around 600 MB for that same twelve-layer document — but the app releases it cleanly when a sketch is closed. Over a fortnight of daily work I encountered one crash, triggered by a rapid sequence of layer-group drags during an iCloud sync; the recovery file reopened with nothing lost. The single-threaded brush engine keeps stroke-to-screen latency below a frame at 120 Hz, which is the quiet achievement that lets you forget the tool and stay inside the drawing.

A workflow: character study in flat colour

This is a walk‑through for a single-figure study built from silhouette to colour-blocked finish, using the tools available in the Pro bundle.

1. Silhouette on a fresh layer. With the Pen Brush set to pure black and 80 % opacity, I block in the figure’s outline on its own layer. No construction lines — just a solid shape.
2. Arc ruler for the drape. A fabric fold needs a clean curve. I activate the arc ruler, place its centre point, and draw the hem in one stroke.
3. Colour blocks on clipped layers. New layers clipped to the silhouette shape hold flat fills: skin, tunic, belt. I use the Area tool set to All layers so it reads the silhouette as a boundary.
4. Smudge for edge softness. Where the collar meets the neck, the smudge tool pulls pigment half a millimetre outward. One pass, low pressure.
5. Group and merge. All colour layers and the silhouette go into a group labelled Figure. Once I am confident the palette is final, I merge the group to a single layer — the merge command is immediate, even on a 5 000‑pixel canvas.
6. Background wash. Behind the figure, a single Acrylic brush stroke in dusty pink sits on a separate layer. No blending, just a flat block of tone.
7. Export as PSD. I export a copy with layers preserved so the colour blocks stay editable if the sketch moves into another app later.

The whole study took under fifteen minutes. Most of that time was spent choosing the three colours; the tool changes — Pen Brush to Area to Smudge — were frictionless enough that they never broke the rhythm of looking at the figure.

A quiet update that sharpens the layer workflow. Layer groups and subgroups let you organise drawings into folders, while new merge, reorder and move actions make the stack easier to control. The release also includes bug fixing and stability improvements.

• macOS 12 or later
• Apple Silicon and Intel 64‑bit