Introducing pau. 2.0: a more natural way to color on iPad

The largest change in pau. 2.0 is not a new button or a longer list of pages. It is the feeling of the canvas itself.

We rebuilt the coloring workspace so a stroke can feel soft, dry, wet, sharp, or textured — while the rest of the app stays quiet. The aim was more expression without more noise: a canvas that gives you choices when you want them and gets out of the way when you do not.

A canvas that follows your hand

pau. has always been designed around iPad. In 2.0, that idea reaches much further into the drawing engine.

Apple Pencil strokes respond naturally to pressure, while finger drawing remains available when that is more comfortable. Size and opacity sit close at hand. Undo, redo, recent colors, the color wheel, and the eyedropper make small corrections quick. Two-finger undo and optional region clipping help you stay in the flow instead of fighting the interface.

Fill now lives beside the brushes, so large areas take one tap without turning pau. into a paint-by-number app. You can still draw over the result, add texture, and make the page your own.

If you want a closer look at the workspace, visit our guide to coloring with Apple Pencil on iPad.

Four free essentials

We wanted the free version to be useful for real coloring sessions, not just a preview of the library.

Everyone can use:

• Fill for quickly coloring a complete region
• Soft Round for smooth, pressure-responsive shading
• Fineliner for outlines and small details
• Marker for saturated, even color

Eraser, undo and redo, size, opacity, palettes, recent colors, and the eyedropper remain part of the core workspace. Favorites, Continue, Recent, and My Works are also available without a subscription.

That distinction matters to us: organizing your own work is not a Premium feature.

The Premium brush studio

Premium expands the canvas into a natural-media studio. Watercolor can pool softly. Oil Paint leaves a denser mark. Dry Gouache, Pastel, Chalk, Crayon, Airbrush, Splatter, and the rest of the production brush set each bring a different rhythm to a page.

Smudge is part of Premium too, letting you soften edges and move pigment already on the canvas.

You do not have to subscribe just to understand how those tools feel. New users can begin a one-time 72-hour Premium-tools preview from the brush picker. Premium tools stay clearly marked, so the boundary between included and subscription features is visible before you choose.

Colors with a starting point

A blank color wheel can feel like another decision to make. pau. 2.0 gives each page a thoughtful starting palette, then lets you move beyond it.

You can:

• use colors curated for the illustration;
• revisit recent colors;
• adjust a shade with the color wheel;
• sample a color directly from the canvas; and
• edit the active palette as the page develops.

Premium adds reusable custom palettes and the option to create a palette from a photo. A walk, a room, a book cover, or a favorite piece of fabric can become the beginning of the next page.

A home for your work

Coloring rarely happens in one sitting, so pau. 2.0 treats unfinished pages as work worth returning to.

Continue and Recent bring active pages back to the surface. Favorites keep future ideas close. My Works separates in-progress pages from completed pieces, and progress is saved automatically while you color.

The full illustration library and Premium collections remain part of the subscription, but the tools for organizing pages you have started or saved are available to everyone.

Explore how the shelf is organized in our guide to digital coloring books for iPad.

Finish and share

Completing a page now has a clearer ending. You can mark the artwork finished, save a still image, or watch a time-lapse of the session coming together stroke by stroke.

Free exports include a small pau. mark. Premium removes that mark from both still images and time-lapse videos.

The time-lapse is not meant to turn coloring into content you have to publish. It is simply a satisfying record of the work — something you can keep, send to a friend, or never share at all.

What has not changed

pau. 2.0 still has no ads and requires no account. The interface is still intentionally quiet. Daily inspiration and new illustrated pages still give you a reason to return without creating a streak to maintain.

The point is the same as it was on day one: open a page, settle your attention somewhere small, and color at your own pace.

If that sounds like the kind of break you need, download or update pau. on the App Store. pau. 2.0 requires an iPad running iPadOS 18.6 or later.

You can also begin with one of our free printable adult coloring pages or read about building a mindful coloring routine.

Frequently asked questions

See you on the canvas — Tina