Look No Fingers! HTC Flyer Takes Off.

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

Tags: art, brushes, digital artist, digital painting, doodle, DRAWING OR PAINTING ON APPLE OR ANDROID, drawing tablet, learn, purple owl, valerie beeby

BATTLE OF THE APPLES 8

Sketchbook Mobile App on the (Android) Galaxy Tab

Last in the Battle of the Apples

With the arrival of Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile, my Galaxy Tab became more of a professional artist’s tool. I’m still amazed by the number and variety of painting, drawing and photographic apps there already are for Android. Sketchbook takes another step up.

When its Honeycomb operating system gets going, specially written for tablets, Google is sure to gather more than the few current serious painting apps. Meanwhile Sketchbook Mobile is surely top Android finger painting application.

It’s possible to try the app out with the free version first, Sketchbook Mobile Express.

Even this free basic version is fast and responsive on the Galaxy touch screen (which actually is higher resolution than the iPad).

Choice of brushes is less in Express, and layers are fewer and less versatile than in the paid version.

Saving and exporting options are limited for free, but you may still have all you need.

Pay a ridiculously small sum compared with desktop prices, and you get a lot more in Sketchbook Mobile – er – Non-Express for Android.

Forty five brushes can be fine tuned like those for the iPad in Sketchbook Mobile. (See my previous apple, painted in Sketchbook Mobile on iPad. The app is very similar for both machines.)

Layers can be skewed or sized.

Select your colours from a rainbow or a palette in both versions, with sliders for tone and transparency.

On the unfortunate side, there are very few stages of Undo here, so you’ll have to save your work often.

Still, talking of saving, Sketchbook Mobile exports or emails artwork not only as .jpg or .png, but with layers intact as a Photoshop .psd.

Tags: android, apple, art, digital artist, digital painting, drawing tablet, purple owl, sketching, tablet, tutorial, valerie beeby