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 Colors, originally made for Nintendo and now adapted for iphone and ipod has advantages.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 offers the option of saving your work on your iphone or ipod at three sizes, Large being considerably bigger than the maximum size you can save on the spot in Brushes, though you can save at larger sizes on your Mac in the desktop version of that application.
Brushes also allows you to import a photo or previous drawing to work on. Colors does not.
Both apps save your brush strokes – well, finger strokes as you make them, allowing you to Undo right back to early stages of your work. Afterwards you can play the sequences as movies.
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, iPad & iPhone Painting, iphone apps, Iphone Painting, ipod touch, tips, tutorial
COME ALONG NOW, PUT YOUR WORST FACE FORWARD!
PAINTER 12 BRUSHES
Why do they use black color all over the app. Paint application is generally used by students and young people and they get bored of seeing these colors. It has to be colorful to attract the eyeballs.
-Raja Krishna
Creative Designer
Well Raja, I think it’s a matter of taste. I like a black ground for a rainbow image such as a colour wheel myself. It makes the colours glow more brightly in contrast, like a colourful movie screen in a dark auditorium.
Layers app is the best of all even better than sketchbook mobile!!
The iPhone apps just amaze me! Being a Painter painter, it’s hard to imagine what all this tiny piece of hardware can let you do!
I’d want the Colors, along with Brushes’ ability to import photos on occasion. I may have missed your discussion on this, but can you use a tiny stylus with the brushes in Colors?
Barb
.-= Barb Hartsook´s last blog ..What Would You Rather Be Doing? =-.
i haven’t said much about using a stylus, Barb. You can get a ‘Pogo’ stylus that you can use to draw and paint on the iphone (or ipod Touch). I got one as I did miss having a stylus – but strangely enough, I now rarely use it as I find I paint better with my finger, to which the screen seems more responsive.
Colors does allow you to choose an offset for the contact point of your drawing finger – equivalent to the point of a pencil or brush. You can choose your drawing point a little ahead of your finger so it isn’t hidden. Once again though, I find I have got used to the drawing point being directly under my finger tip as it is in Brushes, and take a little while to adapt to the different position in Colors.
I came across this same dilemma and it resulted in me writing up a complete interface comparison between both of these apps on my site (link). I’m still unsure which is the best app. They both have glaring drawbacks, and both are missing features the other possesses.
Thanks for giving the link to your comparison page. I read it with great interest. Mine is less comprehensive, but I’m glad the screen shots were useful. I’ve sometimes found it handy to start in Colors and then import to Brushes – see my earlier post, ‘A Bigger Size of Small’.
It’s a pity you can’t do it the other way round so you can save at large size on the phone in Colors.
I’ve joined you on Twitter. Thanks for joining me.
I’ve just got an iPhone 3G S and am going to compare using Brushes and Colors on the two phones, 3G and 3G S, to see if there’s any difference.
oops, somehow got a re-pete on there, sorry.
cheers,
pete
Hi! Cool review piece. Thanks for including screen shots for those of us who are in the Forced Luddite ranks. Looks like a fun couple of apps to mess about with, but I think I’d prefer them adapted to a large graphics tablet so as to be able to enjoy fingerpainting again
I love the ‘twist’ to your comparison,”why not take your choice from both”, sound advice since one app can import and one app has some tool advantages. Just not used to seeing that advice, which would never appear in a Painter/Paint Shop Pro/Photoshop features comparison, unless maybe it were produced for the Wealth cable television channel!Cheers,
pete
pete
Yes, Pete, I think it would be a mite unfair to suggest that artists starving in their garrets should purchase Photoshop, Painter and Paint Shop Pro in order to choose between them! The iPhone may be an expensive bit of kit, but once you’ve got one (or an iPod Touch which is a bit less pricey) the apps are ridiculously cheap.