My favorite new app is a beautiful coloring book that just won Apple's prestigious Design Award

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I hadn’t heard of Lake before the app won an Apple Design Award, but now I’m hooked.

The annual Design Awards honor the best new apps, the ones Apple thinks are especially useful or beautiful — typically new apps that indicate a trend in design. Lake, a virtual coloring book, was among this year's 12 winners, which Apple announced at its annual developer conference this week.

Lake may be one of several apps that jumped on the adult-coloring-book trend, but it's also one of the best out there. It's well-designed, easy to use, and doesn't have any unnecessary features or annoying ads — instead, it's just you, a couple types of paint brushes, a huge color palette, and some beautiful illustrations. 

Here's how to use it. 

Lake was created by a team in Slovenia and first launched at the end of 2016. The app is available for both iPad and iPhone and is compatible with Apple pencil (but it works just fine with your finger, too).

Source: Apple

The app is free to use, and for the first 60 days, you'll get one new drawing from Lake every day for free. After that, you can pay for a weekly, monthly, or yearly subscription.

You can also scroll through illustrations made by other artists, which are free, too.