Drawing Pad Arrives on Galaxy Note

Do a search for ‘Painting’ apps in the Android Market and very few apps come up. Are all the developers waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich? Aha, but search for ‘Drawing’ apps and – abracadabra! Suddenly page after page of drawing and painting apps for Android tablets and phones appear.

Now you have a different problem.

How do you know which drawing apps are best with such a bewildering multitude to choose from, most of them free or costing ludicrously little? How do you sort out the reasonably serious painting apps from the silly hat and fairground mirror brigade?

I would not have picked out Drawing Pad, which proclaims it’s just for kids, if I did not already have it on my iPad.

Drawing Pad does not look promising.

Drawing Pad has no layers, no pinch zoom while you paint, no adjustment of width or transparency for pens, pencils or brushes.

Unlike its iPad brother, Drawing Pad for Android offers no smudge facility to blend your colours. You can’t use your own photo as a background. You can’t import your own artwork as a rubber stamp.

Altogether that adds up to a dead loss, wouldn’t you say?

Yet Drawing Pad is gorgeous. It’s one of my favourite drawing and painting apps. I rate it among the best.

Drawing Pad is fast. The S pen stylus for my Samsung Galaxy Note just glides along, laying down luscious colours from tempting rainbows of brushes, crayons and pens. Colours are wedded to the tools they belong to, as in real life, but there’s a big range to choose from.

You can of course paint with your finger or a soft tipped stylus like the Pogo or Boxwave, the two I happen to have. Any are instantly responsive in Drawing Pad, at least on my Galaxy Note.

I believe Drawing Pad is only available for a limited number of tablets and phones. I was going to try it on the Android HTC Flyer, but could not find a version for the Flyer, even though it has a larger screen than my Galaxy Note.

Tags: android, art, brushes, design, digital artist, digital painting, drawing, DRAWING OR PAINTING ON APPLE OR ANDROID, drawing pad, drawing tablet, flower, galaxy note, ice cream sandwich, photo, purple owl, valerie beeby

Here you see the colour wheel for the HTC Flyer tablet stylus in all its glory.  I have to admit it. That’s not a lot. Eight colours even counting black and white.

With a feather light touch and bit of luck you can blend these hues with the highlighter tool. However, just in case you get over-excited, the highlighter offers only half the colours, four.

Never mind. The Flyer stylus offers at least a beginning hint of pressure sensitivity. Something tablet and smartphone artists are keen to get their fingers on.

The HTC Flyer sylus can only be used with its own drawing app.

Happily there are quite a few Flyer tools. Pencil, ball point pen, brush, calligraphy pen, marker, highlighter and eraser.

All  tools come in a choice of 5 widths.

Pity about that limited palette. To be fair the HTC Flyer stylus is only really made for making notes, highlighting text, signing documents and such. For those office tasks the Flyer can be really useful.

Tags: android, brushes, digital artist, digital painting, doodle, drawing, drawing tablet, notepad, purple owl, sketchbook, smartphone, tablet, tips, valerie beeby

Was this flower painted with a finger? No.

Was it painted with a marshmallow tied to a stick, in other words with the usual kind of touch tablet stylus? No. It was drawn with a point as hard and sharp as a pencil, on the HTC Flyer tablet.

The HTC Flyer has a touch screen you can draw or paint on with finger or special stylus, just like the iPad or any other tablet.

However, the Android HTC Flyer is the only tablet with a hard nibbed stylus as an extra. This stylus is quite unlike the offerings from Pogo, Nomad and other makers.

For once and at last the Flyer pen allows you to write, paint or draw on the screen with a sharp, firm point.

The pen may or may not come bundled with the HTC tablet. It can be bought separately (but don’t buy it for other tablets, as it seems only to work with the Flyer).

Put in a small battery and away you go. I have to admit it’s a joy to be able to draw and paint with a pen on a touch screen tablet.

With the Flyer stylus you can rest the heel of your hand on the page without the machine interpreting this as a two-finger signal to start moving about.

The glass surface is a little slippery, but the Flyer screen is fast and responsive and you do have a fair bit of control over detail and lettering.

Don’t get too excited. The pen is really intended only for making rough notes.

Colours are limited, though there is a good range of tools. Pencil, ball point, brush, pen, marker, highlighter and eraser.

You also have a range of widths and can get quite fine detail.

How do you put the HTC Flyer stylus into action? Touch the screen with the pen and a screen shot is immediately made of the page you want to scribble on. The flower painting above was made on a page in the painting app Fresco, but as it was just on a copy of the page it was not integrated with the painting app. (I did integrate it later, by exporting and re-importing it into Fresco, but that’s another story.)

PS One more story. I did find the highlighter was at least a little pressure sensitive. Pressing hard gave a darker mark than pressing lightly. Small difference, but it does seem to show what’s possible…

Tags: android, art, digital artist, digital painting, doodle, DRAWING OR PAINTING ON APPLE OR ANDROID, drawing tablet, htc flyer, iphone apps, painting, sketch, sketching, stylus, valerie beeby

What Does Painter 12 Spell? Temptation.

I have resolved to stick steadfastly to exploring Android finger painting apps (and a few on my iPad) only. Thus in spite of many temptations, I refrained from getting Corel Painter 12 which many are raving about, because it’s for desktop only.

So far so virtuous. That is, until I attended a Painter 12 demo by Jeremy Sutton in darkest Soho here in London the day before yesterday. Temptation struck again through Jeremy’s lusciously colourful and inspiring Painter demo,. Still I stood firm by my resolve.

That is, I stuck to my Android Only resolve until the end, when they drew our lottery tickets out of the hat.

Guess what. I WON Painter 12! True. A complete shiny copy of Painter 12!!! Collapse of stout party. Disarray of resolutions. …Never mind. I’ll be back on the Android painting apps in a day or two, with something that’s really something to compare them with.

Tags: android, art, creative, digital artist, digital painting, drawing tablet, iPad & iPhone Painting, painter12, painting, purple owl, valerie beeby

SEVEN PAINT APPS FOR SEVEN PURPOSES

I got through a record number of apps in creating this iPad painting

1: This stepping-stone progress began with a doodle in order to explore a new painting app called Procreate.

In Procreate you have what seems at first an overwhelming choice of adaptations to a set of given brushes. There’s Shape with Scatter, Rotation and Randomised adjustment sliders. There’s Grain with Movement, Scale and Filtered sliders. Opacity or size can be altered by the speed of your stroke. You can also choose the spacing of your line, from continuous to dotted..

Dizzy yet?

In Procreate you can also make a brush from your own artwork or photo. I did have a lot of fun creating the foreground grasses from an iphone photo of an old door.

No aspersions on Procreate, but I was not too happy with my results. So began my quest through six more apps.

2: Hoping to improve my colours, I ran the image through the photographic editing app Photogene. (By the way leagues better than Adobe’s surprisingly lame Photoshop Express.)

3: Still unsatisfied, in spite of the addition of a frame, I decided to reduce to a monotone.  I subjected my unhappy graphic to some drastic posterisation in Toon Paint.

4: Next aim was to restore some life to the alarmingly skeletal result. I loaded it as a background in the luscious if limited Drawing Pad, and happily daubed back the trees with some of those paint loaded brushes.

I was glad to find that in Drawing Pad I could now blend the colours with the recently added smudge tool.

Things were improving but all was not yet done.

5: Now I needed a paint can that would fill an enclosed space, rather than flooding an entire layer. I filled the sky and foreground in Art Studio, which has a huge selection of tools.

6:  Finally, to choose from a big array of effects, I ran my image through Photo Studio.

7: Pic Grunger gave an even more textured final look, turning my dross into gold.

Which app was best? I can’t say that any one of these many iPad painting apps is ‘best’. All are different. Once you have your iPad, trying several paintng and photographic apps won’t do much more damage to your budget. Compared with desktop prices, these painting and photographic apps cost next to nothing. Some are even free.

Tags: art, brushes, creative, digital painting, DRAWING OR PAINTING ON APPLE OR ANDROID, drawing tablet, iPad & iPhone Painting, purple owl, valerie beeby