Grab free books on photography, music, video production and drawing from Apple

October 24, 2018

By Kim Komando

Your iPad can be a great tool for productivity, letting you write down ideas and lists, keep track of appointments, check your email, and buy necessities online. But it can also be a great tool for creative projects, which you can learn about by downloading free ebooks from Apple right now.

These free books are the “Everyone Can Create” series, which are guides to different art forms, and how you can use the iPad to make them. There’s a lot in the volumes about different functions of the iPad; how to use certain apps for your projects, and how to use the iPad camera and such.

But if you don’t have the iPad, these books can still be valuable to you, because they have plenty of tips on technique and how to improve in the art forms they cover. The practice activities within the books can even be adapted to use without an iPad as well, so truly, the “Everyone Can Create” books are for everyone!

There are four “Everyone Can Create” books, which are designed for professionals as well as amateurs, along with a teacher’s guide, so the books can be used in classrooms as well as in your home. Read on to see a glimpse of what each book covers, and how you can approach it with or without an iPad. Then download the books you want most from Apple App store, and start creating art you’re excited about today!

Everyone Can Create: Drawing

Everyone Can Create: Drawing teaches you about — you guessed it — drawing. Starting with word art, AKA designing letters with patterns and angles for an artistic effect, and taking you through doodling, observational sketching, landscapes, portraits, and eventually logo and infographic design, this book starts off with concepts most people would have encountered at some point in their lives, like letters and making patterns, and guides a reader into more complicated ideas.

This includes things like breaking down objects into different shapes to draw them, and mapping a human face to better capture it.

At 92 pages, Everyone Can Create: Drawing gets into some detail about these techniques and art forms, but manages to keep them relatively simple terms, and makes them fun to read. If you use your iPad as you read along, you’ll learn about the apps Tayasui Sketches School, Keynote, and Pages, plus a bit about Camera and Photos to get reference shots, and edit them to make drawing easier.

You’ll also get more familiar with the Apple Pencil as you move through the activities.

If you don’t have an iPad to use though, you can still participate in most of the activities in this book. You can just do them on paper, with pencil or pen, or whatever other art supply you feel like using. A hint for one particular activity within the book: when you need to break photos down into shapes, you can always print a picture out to draw on it if you can’t draw on it on an iPad or smartphone.

You may miss out on convenient features like the Fill tool by using pen and paper, but you’ll still be able to draw, which is what this book aims to teach you to do. To start mastering the art of drawing, get the Everyone Can Create: Drawing book here.

Everyone Can Create: Photo

In Everyone Can Create: Photo, you’ll learn all about photography, and the techniques involved in taking a good photo, such as composition, lighting, using different angles, adjusting focus and exposure on your camera, and editing your photos to make sure they look their best.

Plus, you’ll learn a bit about working with people you want to take pictures of, how to make them comfortable, and how to time your landscape photos to get the best shot at the best time.

If you use your iPad to follow along with the book’s activities, you’ll get very familiar with your Camera and Photos apps as you take and edit pictures, as well as Keynote and Pages to make presentations of your pictures, and to put them in posters or books. The book is 69 pages long, shorter than Everyone Can Create: Drawing, but given that it’s focusing on a specific medium, rather than all the different ways a person can draw and design, it just has less ground to cover.

You get just as many activities, all geared toward the art of taking a great picture, and you still learn a storytelling aspect to the art form, with photojournalism and publishing chapters. Following along without an iPad is slightly more involved in this book though. You need some sort of camera to do any of the activities, and ideally, you’d also have a computer with photo-editing software too.

Your smartphone will have similar functions and programs to the ones described in this book, particularly if you have an iPhone, so an iPad isn’t entirely necessary. But you still need particular equipment that can be expensive, so that’s a consideration if you’re diving into this medium for the first time. For a great way to think about the art form if you are, get the book Everyone Can Create: Photo here.

Everyone Can Create: Video

If Photo had special equipment and software requirements, Everyone Can Create: Video takes you through even more of them. But if you want to get great footage of things, and know how to edit in Clips, this book is a great guide you should get.

If you have a smartphone or a tablet, you have a video camera you can work with. And Everyone Can Create: Video can give you tips on what shots look best on film, and how to get interesting angles and lighting in your projects. With that, and the activities the book challenges you to complete — an introduction to your project, a short documentary, an animatic — you can get a lot out of this book, even without an iPad.

However, while the book is 107 pages, you’ll still find a lot of it is dedicated to the Clips app, and its many functions. Which are actually all very interesting, and helpful for video editing. But they also necessitate that you own an iPad, making this book perhaps a little less universal than the others, but still handy if you want to learn some basics of filmmaking in a simple and interesting way. To get Everyone Can Create: Video, click here and download the book for free.

Everyone Can Create: Music

And so we come to the last book in the Everyone Can Create series — Everyone Can Create: Music. If you want to understand the GarageBand app, this is absolutely the book for you. You get 88 pages of information, tips, and fun projects to try with it, as well as some overviews on song construction and a little bit of music theory.

All while Justin Timberlake talks to you through the book — this book, along with the others in the Everyone Can Create series, has a ton of videos in it, and JT himself is the lead in most of the ones here.

This might be the one book can isn’t useable without an iPad. You can get all sorts of ideas for projects to try with other audio-editing software you might have, and learn some of the basic principles of songwriting, but this book is mostly a software guide, and without the software, it might not be much fun for you to go through.

If you have GarageBand in some form though, on your desktop, or on a tablet, this book is great. The activities and practice the book walks you through is for the tablet/mobile version of GarageBand, so things might look different on your desktop, but the functionalities are the same in the different software versions, so just play around to see the differences, or search the web or the “Help” section for some help in finding some functions.

To start making your own songs in GarageBand right now, get Everyone Can Create: Music from Apple by clicking right here.

Get your books now

The Everyone Can Create series is a great set of four books, which again come with a teacher’s guide in case you want to bring these programs and art projects into your classroom. They’re designed for everyone; the person who has never drawn before, the professional musician, the kid with a love of movies, and the grown up photography hobbyist. Enjoy each of these guides into the creative world, and the artistic mediums they teach you, right now, absolutely free, by going to the Apple App store and downloading them now. We can’t wait to see your creations!