Skelly - Art Model 4+

I think Skelly has an intuitive posing system, and this is something I really like about it. However, I wish a few basic things could be improved about Skelly. One of those things is that Skelly doesn’t have a female model. You only get a male model. Also, there’s certain joints of the skeleton that you cannot pose. You cannot pose the jaw of the skeleton. You also don’t have the option to pose the hands & feet. The inability to pose the jaw, hands & feet creates some limitations when it comes to the types of poses that are possible. Additionally, it’s not possible to export a pose as a PNG image with a transparent background. You have to take a screenshot if you want to export your pose as an image, which isn’t ideal.

If you're a serious artist, then Skelly is a no-brainer. I don't mean to put down any other products here, such as the ArtPose apps, but Skelly delivers a couple of things you just have to appreciate.

For one thing, the mechanism for manipulating joints is delightfully easy, with clear handles that let you achieve precise poses quickly. If you want to spend more time drawing than posing your artist model, you can't beat Skelly.

The other thing I love about Skelly is the fact that the developer deliberately kept the model generic. You get a skeleton and a robo skeleton, and that's it. At first glance, that may not seem like a benefit, but it really is. Without more specific details and even muscle masses, Skelly forces you to fill in the details from your imagination, so you don't have to actively tune out unwanted elements as you draw.

Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. I'd love to see a simple undo function added. If they provided adjustment tools for the hips and ribcage or even just male and female proportions, that would be nice too. And while I appreciate the ability to save poses, The ability to pass poses between devices would be a real benefit to those of us who use both an iPad and an iPhone to illustrate, as you could build a pose on your iPad and then pull it up on your phone to have as a reference while you illustrate. None of these are deal-breakers though.

Firstly, the controls are terrible. It’s opposite of which direction you wish for it to turn. The pose range is not anatomically correct at the slightest miss turn. Did I mention that when you click on one bone and try to turn it with the arrows it clicks on a new bone? Well, that’s what happens. You cannot turn the arm below the elbow other than side to side. Want to go down? Well, you have to move the entire shoulder. Easy enough right? Well actually no, because when you try to turn the shoulder in a nature direction it goes crazy. Secondly, the camera function is not at all usable. Trying to turn the entire skeleton view is a nightmare it either flips out or simply doesn’t do it. The zoom function and lighting function work as advertised. If you just want the preprogrammed poses than it is a great app. However, is it worth the price? Absolutely not. This app is worth at most 1.99 and that’s generous. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.