Getting Started With Paper And Markers
I picked up Paper And Markers a while back when my studio was looking for something lighter than the usual pro drawing suites. The idea is straightforward: it tries to replicate the feeling of working with actual markers on paper, but inside a digital canvas. That sounds simple enough, but the execution has some real gotchas that nobody tells you about until you're mid-project and things start behaving strangely. The app itself is a raster-based illustration tool focused on marker-style brushes and texture mapping. It runs on macOS and Windows, and you can download it directly from their site at paperandmarkers.com. There's a free tier that limits you to a handful of brushes and a single layer, which is fine for quick sketches but useless if you're trying to do anything serious. The paid license runs around $39 for a one-time purchase, or $4.99 a month if you'd rather lease it. I went with the one-time buy and haven't looked back, though I know people who bounce between the two models depending on their workflow.
What You Actually Get With Paper And Markers
Before you install it, understand what this app is and isn't. It's not a vector tool. You won't get clean editable paths the way you would in something like Illustrator or Affinity Designer. It's also not a photography editor. If you're looking to retouch images or work with RAW files, walk away now. What you are getting is a set of marker, pencil, and watercolor-style brushes with a texture engine that simulates paper grain, bleed, and layer blending in a way that feels organic rather than digital. The brush engine is the main selling point. Each brush has parameters for opacity, flow, pressure sensitivity, and a texture map that determines how the stroke interacts with the canvas. The texture maps are what make this tool distinct from generic painting apps. They simulate the actual physical behavior of a marker on paper — the way ink pools at the edges of a stroke, the way overlapping passes build up color density, the way a dry brush skips over the grain. These aren't minor details. They're the difference between something that looks like digital clip art and something that actually feels hand-drawn.
Setting Up Your Workspace
The default workspace is functional but sparse. When you first open it, you'll see a minimal toolbar on the left, a canvas in the center, and a properties panel on the right. That's all you need, but it's not optimized for anyone doing detailed work. I reorganized mine immediately. Move your brush panel to the bottom dock. Put your layers on the right side below the properties panel. Create a custom keyboard shortcut for zoom with the spacebar drag, because you will be zooming in and out constantly. This isn't optional. If you're working at a small canvas size and trying to zoom with menus, you're wasting time. I keep my canvas at 3000 by 4000 pixels for most projects, which gives me enough resolution for print without cratering my graphics card. Here's something the manual doesn't mention: set your canvas resolution to 300 DPI before you start drawing. Most people launch the app and begin sketching at the default 72 or 96 DPI, then realize too late that their artwork looks soft when they try to export it for print. Fixing that after the fact means redrawing or accepting a blurry result. I've seen this happen to enough people that it's worth mentioning upfront.
Get the Full Details
How The Brush System Actually Works
Each brush in Paper And Markers has five core attributes: tip shape, bristle density, ink load, paper texture interaction, and drying time. The last one sounds made up but it's real. When you set a brush to have a longer drying time, the strokes remain wet on the canvas longer, which means subsequent strokes will blend into them naturally. Set it to fast dry and they sit on top without merging. This is how the app simulates the difference between a fresh marker pass and layering over already-dried ink. Pressure sensitivity is handled through whatever tablet driver you're running. Wacom, Huion, and XP-Pen all work without extra configuration. Apple Pencil works on the iPad version. The default pressure curve is reasonably responsive out of the box, but if your strokes feel too light or too heavy, go into the preferences and adjust the pressure mapping. There's a graph where you can tweak the input-to-output curve, and spending ten minutes on this will make your workflow feel significantly better than leaving it at the default. The texture maps are stored in a folder on your system. On macOS they're in your Library/Application Support/PaperAndMarkers/Textures, and on Windows they're in AppData\Local\PaperAndMarkers\Textures. You can add your own scans of actual paper textures here. I scanned a few sheets of cold-press watercolor paper and heavy-weight Bristol board, and the results were noticeably better than the built-in textures for certain projects. The app reads PNG and TIFF files up to 4K resolution for the texture maps. Going higher than that doesn't improve anything and just slows down brush rendering.
A Real Problem I Hit And How I Fixed It
About six months in, I ran into a weird issue where my brushes would occasionally stutter and drop strokes when working with large canvases and multiple texture layers. This happened consistently whenever I had more than four layers with texture maps applied and the canvas was above 4000 pixels on the long side. The app would freeze for half a second every few strokes, and sometimes entire strokes would vanish from the canvas. I spent a day troubleshooting before I figured out what was happening. The texture engine applies the paper grain in real-time as you draw, and each texture layer multiplies against the active brush map. Four texture layers plus a complex brush meant the app was doing a lot of pixel math on every stroke. The fix wasn't dramatic. I disabled the real-time texture preview on inactive layers, reduced the texture resolution on my background paper layer from 4K to 2K (which is visually indistinguishable at normal viewing distances), and switched to using a merged layer strategy where I'd merge texture-heavy sections once they were finalized rather than keeping them as separate editable layers. This dropped my stutter rate to essentially zero. The project that was causing the problem went from unworkable to finishing in a few hours. If you hit the same issue, that's the workaround. Don't restart the app or reinstall. It's a resource management problem, not a corruption problem.
Exporting And File Management
Paper And Markers exports to PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and PSD. The PSD export preserves layers, which is important if you need to move work into Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint later. The PNG export preserves transparency and supports 16-bit color, which matters for print work. JPEG will compress your colors and introduce artifacts, so avoid it unless you're making web thumbnails. One thing to watch: the default export settings apply a mild sharpening filter that looks fine on screen but can make your artwork look harsh when printed. Turn that off in the export dialog if you're sending files to a printer. I learned this the hard way on a print job where the exported file looked fine on my monitor but the proofs came back with visible edge halos around dark strokes. A two-click setting change fixed it. The app also supports batch export, which is useful if you're preparing artwork for a series of social media posts or a product line. You can set up an export profile with specific dimensions, formats, and naming conventions, then apply it to a folder of canvases. This turned a process that used to take me about 45 minutes into something that runs in under three minutes.
Where This Tool Falls Short
It's not great for line work. If your workflow depends on clean, consistent ink lines like comic art or technical illustration, this isn't the right tool. The brushes are designed for painterly, textured results, and the line quality you get will always have some organic variation. That's a feature for illustration but a bug for anything requiring precision. The animation tools are basically nonexistent. There's a frame-by-frame timeline, but it's bare-bones. No onion skinning, no tweening, no export to animation formats. If you need to animate, you're looking at a different app entirely. Cloud sync is weak. The app doesn't have native cloud integration beyond basic iCloud or Dropbox folder syncing. There's no real-time collaboration, no version history, and no undo across sessions. If your computer crashes mid-project and you haven't manually saved, you lose work. I keep a habit of saving every twenty minutes and keeping the last three versions in a separate folder. It's old-school but it works.
Who Should Actually Use This
Paper And Markers fits people who want a digital painting experience that feels analog. Illustrators doing children's books, editorial artists, hobbyists who like the look of marker sketches, and concept artists working on mood pieces will all get value from it. If you need vector precision, animation capabilities, or a full photography suite, this isn't for you. For everything in between, it's a solid tool that punches above its price range once you get past the initial learning curve. The learning curve itself is maybe two to three weeks of regular use before things start feeling natural. The first week is mostly figuring out brush settings and getting used to the interface. By week three you're actually drawing. If you give it less than a month and decide it's not for you, you're probably judging it too early.
