What is it about the iPhone painting app Brushes that makes it the artists’ favourite for touchscreen finger painting?
Funnily enough, the Brushes painting app doesn’t offer a particularly wide range of brushes. Only three in fact. Hairy, less hairy and not at all hairy.
The Brushes palette does give a huge range of colours to choose from, together with sliders for shading and transparency. You can also use your canvas as a palette, picking up colour with the eyedropper tool.
…Yes, but you can do that in other iphone and ipod painting apps.
The palette provides a useful comparison of your new choice of colour with the one you’re replacing, but this is scarcely a cause for dancing in the streets.
Nevertheless, David Hockney used this painting application for his ‘everlasting’ flowers. Jorge Colombo too for his famous New Yorker cover. I’ve found impressive work by other artists drawing and painting on both the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
iPhone Artist's Palette. Brushes.
What has Brushes got that other iphone and ipod painting apps have not?
Maybe it’s just that this paint app is simple and fast, and seems to be made for the way many artists like to work. Two-finger zooming and panning is instantly responsive and as a rule everything works like it says on the box.
All the same, don’t think Brushes has it all its own way. Colors, originally made for Nintendo and now adapted for iphone and ipod has advantages.
Funnily once again enough, I find the brushes in Brushes less than handy, as you have to make a special visit to adjust them in their own compartment. In Colors they’re already to hand in the palette. (See the slider for brush width above the one for transparency at the bottom in the screen grab. Two tip types, hard or soft, are up at the top.)
iPhone Artist's Palette. Colors.
Colors also offers the option of saving your work at three sizes, Large being considerably bigger than the maximum size in Brushes.
On the other hand, Brushes allows you to import a photo or previous drawing to work on. Colors does not.
You pays your money and you takes your choice – but since in the Apple App Store prices are around a hundred times smaller than you’ll pay for desktop art software, why not take your choice from both?
Tags: brushes, colors, iphone apps, iphone art apps, Iphone Painting, ipod touch, tips, tutorial
Seth Godin in his famous marketing book, Purple Cow, advocates being – yes, a purple cow.
I can’t say I was all that keen on the idea when I first set up on the net. Destiny, however, had other plans.
I started on the internet by looking for a memorable name. Scanning a list of design firms, I immediately forgot evey title but one, ‘The Red Door’.
Obviously I needed a name that would conjure up a similarly simple. meaningful picture in the mind’s eye. This image would also have to symbolise the web persona I aspired to. Dignified, wise, creative.
I didn’t start off too well. It happened I had recently created a character for a fund raising campaign at my Oxford college. This, with startling originality, was an owl.
Cliche or not, I hesitated some while before venturing to steal back my bird from that illustrious college. In the end, I took the easy way out – and the owl.
Oxford Owl
This drawing may have been a tad too fierce for the university campaign, but I do feel it conveys the bird’s traditional aura of learning and the rigorous pursuit of truth. To this I added the mystic and majestic colour of purple and registered the domain purple-owl.com.
Pride comes before a fall.
To start with I needed a logo. Easy. I painted an owl, set it in a circle and went for a cup of coffee.
Purple - Um Logo
When I returned I gazed at my work of art – only to find it had turned into a purple hippopotamus.
Take another look at the logo yourself. Imagine a couple of nostrils on the lower part of the circle. Lo and behold, a hippo.
Hastily cropping off the lower section of the image, I posted it up. It must be reasonably successful as quite a number of people have stolen it.
Purple Owl Logo
MORAL. Have you really drawn what you think you have drawn? It might just be something else. Go away. Come back and look again.
Meet Seth Godin’s real Purple Cow
Tags: art, creative, learning, logo, memory, metaphor, owl, purple cow, symbol, visualisation, visualise
Here are two sets of polygons pretending to be Art.
Can you spot the difference?
…Don’t spend too much time on it. This is a trick question. Here goes.
iPhone Art Painting 1: Posing Polygons
Polygons Posing as Art
iPhone Art Painting 2: Suspicion
Suspicion
You may have noticed that the first format is a bit fatter than the second, but otherwise they are exactly the same image.
Whether you see it as the Dance of the Polygons, a suspicious face with a green beard or something else entirely, it’s up to you to make up your mind’s eye.
That’s the interesting thing about seeing things… but where was I? Ah yes. Technical details.
Digital images love to confuse us because they can be three kinds of large. Come to that, three kinds of small. It all depends whether you’re counting in:
-
pixels
inches
or bytes
I painted the first image in the iphone app Colors. The Colors app allows you to export your art in three sizes as measured in pixels. Small (320 x 440 pixels), Medium (640 x 880) or Large (1280 x 1760). I saved the picture Large.
I then imported my picture into Brushes, another wondrous iphone (or ipod) art app. David Hockney drew his by now rather famous flower doodles in Brushes. Jorge Colombo has used the same app for a New Yorker cover.
I imported into Brushes by first saving the Colors painting into my iPhone Photo Gallery, then opening it in Brushes.
The Brushes app will only save at 320 x 480 pixels, a mere few pixels larger than the Colors Small size.
Above, both versions look almost the same, but the original of the first contains many more pixels than the second. This makes it larger in bytes as well.
You can see the differences in pixel sizes in the screen grab below.
Colors Big. Brushes Small.
TIP. If you want to use both Colors and Brushes, start in Colors. You can transfer your artwork into Brushes via the Photo Gallery, but you can’t do it the other way around. Colors does not import outside images.
Tags: art, brushes, colors, iphone apps, iphone art apps, ipod touch
Many people complain that the iPhone doesn’t take very good photos in low light. I disagree.
I do have to concede, however, that the iphone doesn’t take very good pictures in the dark.
There’s a health club in the park land opposite my house. Once, I imagine, one of England’s Stately Homes, it has an imposing presence. Now summer’s here it’s invisible by day, hidden by trees. Come night, it blazes into life. I gaze at it, lighted up there in the distance, rapt, when I go to draw my bedroom curtains.
Alas, an iPhone photo of this magical palace of light yielded nothing but a black screen with one or two pin pricks of grey discernible at 500% magnification.
Instead of taking a photograph, I tried painting my impression of the scene with the iphone app Brushes.
You do of course have the advantage of an illuminated canvas when sketching in the dark on an iphone or ipod.
All the same, your actual sketch faces the same difficulties as my iphone camera had encountered. Pictures being made of light, you’re at a bit of disadvantage when there isn’t any.
Dark, Distant and Painted on my iPhone
Luckily I discovered that the photographic iphone app Photogene does almost as well as Photoshop in reviving the colours. Maybe a bit over-enthusiastically. I think now that I might have done better to make the lights brighter in the darker forest, but it’s high time I posted this, so it stays for now…
Palace in the Woods
Tags: brushes, creative, iphone apps, iPhone Art, Iphone Painting, photography
