HEAVYPAINT Classic vs Pocket Easel
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
HEAVYPAINT Classic
A streamlined painting application focused on pure colors and shapes. It offers essential tools for artists, including improved smudge and blur, layers, masking, and erasing. Ideal for quick sketches, studies, and plein air work.
- Improved Smudge tool
- Improved Blur tool
- Layers
- Masking
- Clipping
- Erase tool
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HEAVYPAINT ClassicA simple yet secretly powerful painting app! Focus on pure colors and shapes with a streamlined interface. Ideal for plein air painting, color notes, sketches and studies. + Improved Smudge + Improved Blur + Layers + Masking + Erase + Clipping 30 day trial with full functionality.
Pocket Easel
This app facilitates quick color studies for painting from life, offering a unique palette system that allows color mixing without leaving the canvas. It helps artists maintain color harmony by limiting palettes and provides tools to analyze values and import master palettes.
- Intuitive color mixing gesture
- Gamut masks for palette harmony
- Painterly brush textures
- Value check with grayscale conversion
- Import master palettes
- Save and duplicate color studies
- Export studies with color analysis
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Pocket Easel is a color-study app for painting from life, wherever you are. It works like a painter's palette: a gamut mask decides which colors are on your palette, and a simple gesture lets you mix as you paint — a little warmer, a little cooler, lighter, darker — without ever leaving the picture. The mask is what's on your palette. The gesture is how you mix. Pick Color Without Leaving the Painting Most apps make you stop, open a color panel and drag sliders to an exact value, then find your place again. In Pocket Easel you push the current color from the corner of the canvas, relative to where it is, the way you'd work a touch more paint into a mix. No numbers to hit, so adjusting often costs nothing. Gamut Masks Before you start, choose a mask shape on the color wheel — a preset, or your own triangle or quad. It limits your palette to colors that belong together, so the whole study stays in harmony. Mixing never steps outside it. Painterly Brushes Round and flat brushes, lines and shapes, all with a subtle painterly texture that varies the color as real paint does. Smudge blends the paint already on the canvas. See Your Values Value Check shows your study in grayscale. While you adjust brightness, a ten-step value scale appears beside the wheel. Master's Palette Import a painting you admire and see where its colors sit on the wheel — then fit a mask to its gamut. Color Studies Every study is saved as you go. Name them, duplicate one to try an idea, and pick up any of them later. Share Your Process Export your study with a frame that shows the gamut wheel and the colors you used, or a time-lapse that shows each stroke and where its color came from on the wheel. Made for Phone and iPad Turn your phone sideways to paint with both hands. Left-Handed mode, Dark mode, and the same tools on iPad. Pocket Easel is built for quick color studies, not detailed illustration — the constraint is the point. All painting tools and image export are free. Pocket Easel Pro, a one-time purchase, lets you turn off the frame, remove the watermark or use your own name, and export time-lapse videos.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is review sentiment: Pocket Easel at 100% against HEAVYPAINT Classic's 54%. Pocket Easel also leads on rating (4.9 vs 4.1). HEAVYPAINT Classic's advantage is ratings volume (179 vs 10) and iOS requirement (12.0 vs 17.6). On price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. HEAVYPAINT Classic sells 2 one-off in-app purchases and Pocket Easel sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Pocket Easel holds the better App Store score, 4.9 against 4.1. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: HEAVYPAINT Classic has 179 ratings behind it against 10, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 54% of HEAVYPAINT Classic's written reviews are positive against 100% of Pocket Easel's.
HEAVYPAINT Classic ships an update every 5 days, Pocket Easel every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on November 3, 2026 and November 10, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | HEAVYPAINT Classic | Pocket Easel |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.1 (179 ratings) | 4.9 (10 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 54.5% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 179 — better | 10 |
| Update frequency | Every 5 days | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 12.0 — better | 17.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 51 MB | 5 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | HEAVYPOLY, Inc. | 彬 王 |
Customer experience
HEAVYPAINT Classic
Pocket Easel
Bugs and requests
HEAVYPAINT Classic
Reported bugs
18 issues- App crashes frequently, causing work loss
- Auto-save feature unreliable despite crashes
- Canvas flips upside down randomly
- Transform tool deletes paintings
- Undo button requires multiple taps
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- Zoom functionality buggy and destabilizes canvas
- Canvas resize not working
- Image corruption with layer duplication
- Eye dropper functionality haphazard
- Fill tool doesn't work with selected colors
- Pressure setting eliminates mark-making
- Brush size settings change across all tools
- Some brush textures cannot be changed
- Random blobs appear on export
- App crashes when switching between drawings
- Trial period not clearing for paid users
- Incompatibility with SE2 and older devices
- Speaker popping on undo action
Requested features
15 requests- Gesture controls (2-finger undo, 3-finger redo)
- Pressure sensitivity for brush size
- Lasso tool for moving selections
- Redo button functionality
- Canvas zoom capability
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- Resizable/collapsible UI elements
- Ability to move canvas with single finger
- Line work capabilities
- Better brush texture preset selection
- Canvas size input field
- Eraser tool
- Moveable UI panels
- Tutorial or onboarding guide
- Better save/export documentation
- Pressure control for size on all tools
Pocket Easel
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
HEAVYPAINT Classic
- Seurat Texture Brushes$4.99
- HEAVYPAINT Pro$9.99
Pocket Easel
- Pocket Easel Pro$5.99
Questions
Is HEAVYPAINT Classic free?
Is Pocket Easel free?
Which has better reviews, HEAVYPAINT Classic or Pocket Easel?
Do HEAVYPAINT Classic or Pocket Easel have ads?
Which is updated more often, HEAVYPAINT Classic or Pocket Easel?
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