Let’s just fingerpaint already.
Posted: September 5th, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Apps | Tags: Android, app, art, best buy, blur, brush, circuit city, coloring, drawing, emboss, eric carle, finger, fingerpaint, koalapad, light, move, ms-paint, paid, paint, paintbrush, pen, picasa, picasso, review, store, swirl, tiki, vectrex, vortex, wacom, wallpaper | No Comments »Paint programs. They’re as old as graphical computers themselves, and one of my all-time loves. As a formerly aspiring artist (ages 1-18,) I spent much of my youth perfecting my paint program techniques through various interfaces: joysticks, mice, trackballs, tablets, whatever I could get my hands on, really. Yet as I write this, I only now realize that I’ve never used a light pen. Damn, you know, I’d really like to.
Anyway, I’ve drawn on computers for a long long time in an amateur/enthusiast’s capacity, and I’ve left tracks all over this silly Internet thing. Some really vile tracks, quite intentionally vile, might I add.
See, for some reason I went through a phase where I’d draw grotesque and bizarre scenes in MS Paint on my friends’ computers, and make those pictures their wallpaper. Giant green phalluses…exploding toilets….people being run over by steamrollers…basically stupid shit to get a laugh.
Well, I turned into a junkie for those laughs. At one point, I was making daily ventures to nearby Best Buy and Circuit City shops specifically to draw fucked up pictures on display computers and make them the background for all the shoppers to see and laugh at. I’m weird, I know…but I loved breaking up the staid chain store setups with phantasmagoric and ridiculous imagery. I kept those at a Saturday morning cartoon level of sex and violence, never including anything morally offensive. Ridiculous and inappropriate? Yes…Child-scarring? No.
Like most things, it got boring. So I decided I just wanted to do serious art stuff and lost interest in getting anonymous laughter from shoppers and retail store employees.
That was a long time ago…and now that I’ve clung pretty tightly to my Wacom tablet or good old fashioned physical media like paint/ink/canvas/cardboard/paper, I have completely let the opportunity to draw on a touchscreen phone fall by the wayside. So today, I got Picasso by French developers Tiki Move, a €1.99 “fingerpainting” app in the Android Market and gave it a good, thorough testing while waiting in the airport this evening.
First impression: Fun, but not magical. The app launches directly to a blank canvas and for some reason your default brush color is magenta. I have no idea why…this is probably one of those things the devs didn’t even notice, but most paint programs (and I’m speaking from vast experience here) default to a black. Shit, even the paint program I had on my IBM 286 with only CGA depth didn’t default to magenta, and its colors were only CMYK.
As far as paint programs go, it’s pretty bare bones, You’ve got a few brush options (Pencil/Line, size, fill/blur/hardline, emboss,) a few shape options (circle, rectangle, filled/unfilled,) Flood fill, and one effect called “vortex” which swirls the image with Coriolisness.
You can save your pictures to the SD card as .png files or export them as .jpgs via email/gmail/messaging/picasa/pixelpipe (or other similar exporter) or you can take a screen snapshot.
While playing with the app, pretty much everything bad happened straight out of the gate. I spent a long time drawing and went for a screenshot first. It crashed the app and I lost my drawing. Then I did another one and sent it out via POP3 mail. It never arrived…the same happened with Gmail. I didn’t try Picasa or Pixelpipe because I was sick of redrawing pictures, so I just saved my next file to the SD card. That was the only one that worked.
I mounted my SD card on my computer and found the images that never sent, so they were saved, but the first one that crashed can never be recovered. Too bad, because it was quite a little stunner if I do say so myself.
a test of vortex effect, saved as a PNG
This image is pretty boring, but I was frustrated at this point from the lost images, so I just splattered it up and tapped all over it with “vortex.” It actually kind of reminds me of Eric Carle tissue paper painting, an artist who will forever remind me of my little brother Hubert. Hubert was one of those rare children who at a very young age decided he had a favorite artist before he’d decided he had a favorite television celebrity…his choice was, of course, Eric Carle.
But I’m rambling. This is an app review, after all.
Exploiting the default magenta brush.
The black in this picture is pencil with “blur” turned on. The hard lines are just the standard non-blurry pencil. The rule? Keep it simple, keep it big, and layer the shit out of it. You really get the feel for your limited space and limited gestural accuracy with this app. There is quite a bit of latency in drawing, and I find myself pushing a bit too hard on the screen.
whee. I love macrame and yogurt!
The petals were shaped with pencil with “fill” turned on. This creates free-form op art style shapes when you move your finger around. It’s kind of a nifty feature, especially when you add the “emboss” feature, which makes the shapes look vaguely three dimensional. That feature is used all over this picture.
What do I think in the end? It’s not all that bad. Totally fun to play with and would absolutely be worth the €1.99 if the file export issues get fixed promptly. After all, you don’t want to lose your precious creations just because you had the hauteur to want to show them to people.
Oh…also, you can set your drawings as your home screen wallpaper, so my picture of a vomiting mailbox can proudly be shown off (to be added later.)
