Zen Brush 3

• Price: $4.99

Last verified 31 Jul 2026

4.4 55 ratings · App Store

1. 4/5Almost perfect for kanji practice

   I’ve been using this app to practice writing kanji, and it had a lot of great features and the brush reacts very naturally. If I could add or change anything it would be instant erase. There is an animation that plays when you delete your drawing space that gets annoying and slows down practice. The delete key is also quite small and can be a difficult targets to hit. My workaround is to practice writing in water mode with fast drying, but adding a finger swipe to delete or a “black water” (disappearing ink) function would make it perfect to crank out hundreds of kanji. Also, the grid layer is nice, but even at the largest grid, to get a quadrant you need to zoom in. An extra large grid or paper background would be appreciated.

   bkol · 31 Jul 2026

2. 5/5OK it’s back to five stars

   OK the papers on the right hand side with the Zen rotation I can and only the red brush gives you multiple colors if you hold onto it I guess or drag down from it and the eraser changes if you drag down to a bloody eraser which I don’t understand yet blatting not bloody whatever… And it looks like they erased my criticisms oh well from my previous review that’s OK what’s my one big issue… I try to do a circle and I get this lag or it goes into tilt mode or something and I get this weird straight lines on my curves and gestures that would be a dealbreaker for a real calligrapher artist! Once you buy the app it’s hard to tell how much you paid for unless you work and I’m lazy but I guess it must’ve been cheap enough if I bought it… Pretty good even if some of the 3-D backgrounds are pretty lame better to use a photo of your own of wood or something and this will be much better if you can get the texture going on with the paper and the dry brush is much better in the brush 2! Knouff said… said the Marvel comic guy…Stanley I just remembered… Stan Lee…

   AlanLaBudde · 31 Jul 2026

3. 4/5Much better when you increase the resolution.

   At first I was perplexed as to why the brushes were so much more ‘mushy’ in 3 than in 2, until I realized the default canvas resolution in 3 is much smaller than in 2! Increasing from 768x1024 to 2400x3200 fixes the problem of the dithering being too large and immediately highlights the improvements of the brush engine in 3 over 2. I imagine the reason the default is so low is for better battery life / FPS on lower spec iPads. The user should be prompted to pick a resolution on first launch to make it more obvious that there are multiple quality modes.

   thefoxcam · 31 Jul 2026

4. 5/5It needs a tutorial

   But fun to play with and an interesting thing to use for art block. Rules loosen the mind and make you think more creatively. So I’m impressed with how well it mimics traditional brushes. For line art you can import a sketch and pant it in. The colors are a great addition. The brush sizing bar needs some work and maybe add some cool special effect like salt to the paint, or liquid frisk. You could take this further by adding natural fabric backgrounds and melted wax to mimic batik silk painting since they traditionally use the same brushes. Don’t mind the art major rambling but it’s a mess free way to play with calligraphy brushes which run about $20-$30 per brush plush the solid ink sets with the grinding stone. This app is a fun time.

   Cass art and co · 31 Jul 2026

5. 2/5Badly butchered app

   Zen Brush 2 improved on a great simple program with an intuitive interface by adding multiple undos. Sadly, ZenBrush 3 loses whatever made the original program so excellent. The dry brush effect so brilliantly nuanced, textured and expressive in Zen Brush 2 has been softened and weakened in ZenBrush 3. Equally, the intuitive interface of version 2 has been complicated and butchered in Zen Brush 3. For instance, the Layer function in v3 leaves you scratching your head wondering how the application of something so intuitive and straightforward in so many other apps like Procreate and ArtRage could be so badly blundered that it is unintelligible. That is a shame. I’ve always seen ZenBrush as being much more than a calligraphy app. The expressive quality of the brush strokes in the original lent themselves to abstract art or illustrative purposes. That expressive flexible utility has been blunted in version 3.

   ROC-889 · 31 Jul 2026

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