An instrument for Flat Painting · iPad

Paint that answers to gravity and time.

Mimesis Studio brings real-world gravity and time to digital painting, along with chance and irreversibility. Tilt the iPad and wet paint runs. Leave it and it sets. What you put down stays down.

App Store How it paints

iPad · M1 or later Apple Pencil One purchase

Mimesis Studio on iPad: a green and a red patch of paint on a tilted artboard, with long drips running from both toward the lower left. — **Pl. I**Tilt it, and the paint runs. Drips follow the direction the iPad is held.

Irreversibility

There is no undo.

There is no undo and no eraser. To correct, paint over with white or another color, as you would on a canvas. Each artist has to learn the instrument and make it their own.

Undo: None
Eraser: None. Paint over it.
Grace period: 4 seconds to cancel the most recent stroke, for a stray palm or touch
Closing the app: Time stops. Wet paint waits exactly as you left it.
Another direction: Branch into a new artwork and continue there

Gravity & drying

It behaves much like real paint.

Paint runs downward, in whichever direction the iPad is tilted. Hold it upright and the paint runs fast. Lay it flat and it dries where it pools.

The Solvent slider sets the consistency. The Drying speed slider sets how fast it dries. Drying can be slowed, but never stopped or reversed. Thin paint sets in seconds; thick paint takes minutes.

The screen stays flat on purpose: no simulated lighting, gloss or texture. Edges come from the paint itself, drawn cleanly at output resolution.

Close-up of a red patch of paint with thin drips running out of its left edge. — **Detail**Red paint on a tilted artboard. The drips leave the wet edge and stop as the solvent evaporates.

**Fig. 1**One band of wet paint under gravity, frame by frame. Rendered by the Mimesis Studio engine.

**Fig. 2**Wet into wet. Where running paint meets another wet color, the two merge instead of sliding over each other.

A black-and-white cat painted in grey brushwork. Dabs of mixed paint sit on the grey space beside the artboard, and a reference photo of the cat floats in a small window. — **Pl. II**The whole screen is your palette. Colors are mixed beside the artboard, with the reference photo in its own window.

Pigment & palette

Mixed by light, not by numbers.

Two whites and sixteen digital pigments, each designed by how it absorbs and scatters light, and mixed by those spectra. Color stays spectral until the moment of export. There is no color picker.

There is no black, either. Mix the darkest color you need: Ultramarine Blue with Burnt Umber, or Phthalo Green with Alizarin Crimson.

Everything outside the artboard is the palette. Mix colors and shades there and load them back onto the brush. A color thinned on the palette goes onto the canvas at the same strength.

Paint is used up as you paint. Rub or hold Apple Pencil on a paint well to load the brush; press harder and it fills faster. A new color mixes with what is left on the brush, so wash it first for a clean color. Fingers move and zoom the view. They never paint.

The Solid palette · 2 whites + 16 pigments

Each chip: masstone, then a tint with Titanium White. Computed from the app’s own pigment spectra; colors on screen are approximate.

Titanium White

Zinc White

Lemon Yellow

Cadmium Yellow

Yellow Ochre

Cadmium Orange

Cadmium Red

Quinacridone Magenta

Alizarin Crimson

Dioxazine Violet

Ultramarine Blue

Phthalo Blue

Cerulean Blue

Phthalo Green

Permanent Green

Sap Green

Burnt Sienna

Burnt Umber

Brushes

A brush is not a stamp. It carries paint.

Each brush works bristle by bristle, holding paint and releasing it. Marks change with pressure, tilt and speed, and with how much paint is left. Raise the Rake level for a rough, scraped texture.

Adjust bristle layout and properties to build brushes of your own, and share them as .mimbrush files. A loaded brush can hang on the brush rack, paint and all, and be picked up again later.

Flat
Filbert
Round
Pointed
Wash
Pencil

Dark olive brushstrokes over a pencil drawing of a security camera, a reference photo in a floating window, and a rack of loaded brushes along the bottom of the screen. — **Pl. III**Rack your loaded brushes. Ten slots per artwork, each brush kept with its paint.

Close-up of layered olive and umber brushstrokes with visible bristle streaks, over a light pencil drawing. — **Detail**Bristle marks as the brush empties. Streaks come from the bristle layout and the paint left on it, not from a texture image.

Two color modes

One for paper. One for light.

Each artwork chooses its mode when it is created. Both mix the same way, and both turn muddy if you overmix.

SolidFor output and print

Target: CMYK print
Pigments: 2 whites + 16
Size: Set in millimeters

The sixteen pigments, and their mixtures with white, are designed to fall inside a CMYK print gamut.

LuminousFor displays and mobile

Target: RGB: Display P3 and sRGB
Pigments: 2 whites + 16 + 8 neon
Size: Set in pixels

The neons are designed as fluorescent pigments: they absorb light and give it back as their own color. Mixed or covered, they lose their glow. Emission peaks:

Neon Pink 612 nm
Neon Red 628 nm
Neon Orange 598 nm
Neon Yellow 562 nm
Neon Green 522 nm
Neon Cyan 492 nm
Neon Blue 458 nm
Neon Violet 425 nm

A weeping willow against blue sky rendered as pixel art, next to a small window with the reference photograph. — **Pl. IV**Paint that turns into pixels. The same wet paint, read out as a pixel image.

Pixel Art mode

The flow of paint, on a pixel grid.

Pixel Art mode keeps every bit of the physics. Paint still runs, merges and dries. Only the picture is read out as pixels, from 16 to 512 across.

Limit the color steps and the paint snaps to a reduced palette. At four steps, every pixel lands on one of 64 fixed colors.

Output

Made with the print as the reference.

In Solid mode the artwork is measured in millimeters: paper A and B sizes, photo prints, F-size canvases and more. The size is fixed when the artwork is created and cannot change afterward.

Export	Format	Specification
Print	TIFF	16-bit · Display P3 · 300 DPI
Screen	PNG	16-bit
Web	PNG	For posting online
Artwork file	.mime	The whole working artwork, wet paint included, to move it to another iPad

Start from an image

The artwork takes the image’s proportions, and the image opens in the reference window.

Reference window

A floating window for your source photo. Move it, resize it, zoom into it. It never reaches the export.

Underdrawing

Place a drawing under the canvas to paint over. It takes no part in the physics or the output.

Privacy

Your work stays on your iPad.

No accounts, no advertising, no tracking. Everything is processed on the device, and an artwork leaves it only when you export it.

Mimesis Studio for iPad

One purchase. Every feature.

No subscriptions and no in-app purchases.

iPad: M1 chip or later
System: iPadOS 26 or later
Input: Apple Pencil. Paint goes on with the Pencil only.
Languages: English, Korean, Japanese, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Thai

View on the App Store