Posts tagged Drawing
3 More Free Drawing Apps for Kids
Apr 19th
Like paper coloring books, iPhone and iPad apps cost money. It’s always fun to have the newest, shiniest app in the App Store – but those come with a price. Oftentimes they cost something, and they may not always ring true with your kid. Buying too many apps can add up, making for an unhappy dent on a parent’s credit card bill. So what’s a parent to do?
Welcome to free drawing apps. They’re good enough to use and discard, much like a coloring book that has been filled up. And in this way, the disposable factor makes these apps that much more attractive. They will keep kids entertained for an afternoon – and when you discard them, you’ll feel like you’ve had a good experience with a free product.
MyPaint Free: Get What You Don’t Pay For
MyPaint Free is a fairly simple app for your basic drawing needs. Seriously, do not try to get fancy with this app. Like MSPaint, it offers you a few simple options: change the brush size and softness or the color of the paint. Enlarge the image if you so desire. Draw white scribbly eraser lines in something you’ve just drawn. MyPaintFree succeeds in its simplicity, yet fails in the extra steps you need to take in order to toggle back and forth from painting screen to painting tools. To do so, hit the little puppy in the lower righthand corner of the screen.
To go back and “undo” the last action, choose the little blue hook-like option. Much like the Edit/Undo Typing action on a Word processor, which takes you back to the previous step, MyPaint Free only allows you to backtrack once. It’s no Photoshop, where you can trace your every last move. But then again, it’s free, it’s easy to use and you can just as quickly discard what you’ve made. Paint with your fingertip, not your hand. Drag it across the glass screen until lines look like thick globs of virtual paint. Throw the picture out when you’re done.
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MyPaint Free is a fantastically simple app for momentary creative urges that need a glass screen rather than a piece of scrap paper. It makes one’s fingertip bleed color and feel like a paintbrush in and of itself. ReadWriteWeb highly recommends MyPaint Free for its simplicity and easily discardable nature.
Kid Paint: Go Nuts With Stickers
For the more advanced kid who likes horses, clouds, frogs and hearts mixed in with their scribbles, there’s the free app Kid Paint. The app opens to a blank screen, where a kid is able to choose a tool to use: paint brush, paint bucket or just their finger. An eraser
seems more like a white pencil line, rather than an actual eraser. What differentiates this app from MyPaint Free, however, is the ability to drop on little mini stickers. The nice part about this is, unlike actual stickers that collect dust, hair and tiny human particles of skin – which eventually cause the stickers to lose their stick – these little guys stay stuck virtually, pixel for pixel. You can also upload an image from your camera roll, and play around by painting over that.
Kid Paint is worth the price of free. The premade stickers make this one step up from MyPaint Free and suggest to kids that art can include more than just their own “finger of genius.” It can incorporate premade kitsch items, like smiley-face stickers, frogs and hearts. However, you will grow weary of the same stickers and eventually delete the app from your phone all together.
Vehicle Colors: Paint Your Way to a Car Today!
Both Kid Paints and MyPaint Free don’t care if you draw within the lines. Vehicle Colors is a bit more stringent in that respect, and might appeal more to the perfectionist kid type.
Open the app and turn the iPhone sideways. Then select from four different vehicle-filled options: Cartoon, Magic, Paint and Maze. Select Cartoon, and you’re presented with a shy purple truck. Move the truck around the white canvas, or leave it where it is and draw sparkly lines around it. As the paint “dries,” the sparkles disappear, and you’re left with singular scribbles. Select additional vehicles to add to the image, like a helicopter or a tractor.
The Paint option is more like a coloring book, challenging kids to keep the colors inside the lines. When you’re drawing with your finger, however, that’s much easier said than done.
The Maze option is the most game-y and the least like drawing. A maze pops up on the screen, and you are asked to draw a line from the car to the end of the maze. If you make it successfully, you get a big flashing “Congratulations” sign. Not bad for a free app.
VehicleColors gives kids more structure than either MyPaint Free or Kid Paint. In that sense, it feels more like a game that one can win, especially the Maze option. While receiving rewards for doing things “right” is important, the subtle coloring-in-the-lines mentality within VehicleColors can be limiting at times. The Paint screen on VehicleColors presents an image that needs color rather than a blank white screen. The Magic option script teaches kids that “magic” happens when they take their finger and move it across a black and white screen until perfectly clean colors appear.
Apps like this provide the kind of “magic” that’s worth the price of free.
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Top 3 Drawing Apps for Young Kids
Apr 17th
Learning to draw with your finger isn’t about fingerpaints anymore. It’s not about hands, either. It’s about the smartphone that you keep in your pocket, and give to your kid when they want to get creative. ReadWriteWeb surveyed three apps for children ages 5-6 that give them an opportunity to try and learn how to draw inside the lines, and to create visual effects that will impress peers and parents alike. Just choose your smart device.
How to Draw app: Full version ($1.99)
Open the How to Draw app, and a little boy’s voice comes out of your phone. He is here to teach you and your child how to draw. Select from a variety of items, including three animals (cat, dog, pony, hippopotamus), a reptile that no longer roams the earth (dinosaur), iconic American pop culture imagery (Statue of Liberty, Santa Claus), transportation that you don’t use in everyday life (space shuttle, locomotive, tank), a princess (no prince available) and a skeleton (subtle death reference). These are the available options. Pick one and learn how to draw it using easy, step-by-step instructions from the little boy, who guides you through the process.
After you and your child have completed the instruction on one screen, press the arrow to move on to the next one. To get more complex – to add color, that is – select the little white hand in the bottom lefthand corner, and you’ll see a few paint palettes. Change the color of the line itself, or just color in the image that you are drawing. If you miss an instruction, hit the refresh arrow and the app will replay it.
And when your child is done drawing, they can email the image to themselves or you, or just save it to the app. There is no option to share on Facebook or Twitter – besides, what would a five-year-old be doing on Facebook anyway? Eventually, kids can go ahead and free draw if they’d like.
This app is fun and simple to use. Of course, you get what you pay for: It only costs $1.99, and there are not too many things to learn to draw. After a week or two of play, you can choose to ignore the app and move onto the next.
Art of Glow (free)
For kids who love shiny, sparkly, neon fun – this app is like a sparkly rainbow for the eyes – we present you with Art of Glow. There is a full version available for $0.99, but we decided to review the free version. If your kid loves the free version, spring for the full. If not, just stick with this one-trick pony. (Though be forewarned, if you want to see a pony, you will have to draw it yourself.)
With a few swipes of their fingers on the screen, kids can create a glowing, pulsing visual
effect that will probably hypnotize them and their friends for a few minutes. The default shape is a circle, but Art of Glow gives users the opportunity to switch that up. Choose a heart, a snowflake, a star, a pulsating cornucopia. Change the color of that shape, selecting from a dim-looking palette of red, green, orange, yellow, purple and three shades of blue. Pink and white are not on the color palette. After doing so, tap away on the screen and bring those images back to the screen, adjusting for amount, size, life time, speed and blink. Add more shapes, creating bodies, landscapes or just plain magical landscapes. Or keep it minimal and clean, using only a single finger swipe. After all, less can be more. These aren’t images you are supposed to save – show them to people, then leave the app.
Because of the variety of shapes and forms, Art of Glow will keep kids engaged for longer. This app isn’t trying to teach kids how to draw so much as it’s focused on the visual effects produced by each sparkle and twist. (In other words, your child can go to a rave without actually leaving the couch!) The full version brings in the ability to shoot a quick video. If your child is intrigued by the regular version, drop $0.99 on the full.
iLuv Drawing Santa (free; full version $0.99)
iLuv Drawing Santa teaches kids about the art of consumerism. Christmas is the biggest consumer holiday of all time – and it’s important that we teach our children this around 5-6 years of age. Here’s how the app works. Tap on “Learn to Draw,” and you’ll be directed to a variety of images to draw: Santa Claus, a snowman, an elf and a gingerbread man are among the many things that you and your kid can learn how to draw. A woman’s voice guides you and your child through the drawing process, complete with instructions on where to draw each line. You can color your image in and add a festive background of your choosing. Save the image to the app’s drawing book or to a photo. Or share it via email, print it or share it with the makers of this app.
Even if you do not quite draw within the lines, the app doesn’t penalize you. Besides, it’s hard to get things just right, especially over the holidays.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Live Drawing SXSW: What’s So [Bleeping] Hard About Social ROI?
Mar 14th
We all struggle with social measurement. Are we measuring enough? Are we measuring the right things? Clearly defining social ROI, especially if your business goals aren’t tied to product sales, can be a frustratingly elusive goal. Craig Daitch (Ford), Eric Swayne (M/A/R/C Research), Liz Strauss (Inside Out Thinking), Matt Ridings (SideraWorks) and Petri Darby (Make-A-Wish Foundation) explain the metrics you should be focusing on and how to measure conversion when that doesn’t always mean an obvious sale.
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Live Drawing SXSW: Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit
Mar 13th
In this keynote, Lev Grossman from TIME Magazine talks with visionary, Ray Kurzweil, to hear his thoughts on how the future of AI will affect our thinking and how we might expand our intelligence without limit.
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Live Drawing SXSW: How to Harvest Consumer Intent from the Social Web
Mar 12th
We’re all drowing in tweets, Facebook shares, plus ones and pins, but how do consumers follow those trails to act? With so much signal, it’s all noise. At this session, panelists AJ Vaynerchuck, Edward Boches, Farrah Bostic, Jeff Janer and Jolie O’Dell, shared their wisdom to help businesses discover intent in the data maelstrom.
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Live Drawing SXSW: Network Effect: Building a Business Around Sharing
Mar 11th
Dropbox is a file sharing standard many hope to emulate. Have you ever wondered about the story behind the cloud wonder, Dropbox? Drew Houston, CEO and Co-Founder, sat down to share the history of Dropbox’s early days. Two questions framed the discussion. How did you get here? How will you stay?
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Live Drawing SXSW: Adding Value As a Non-Technical No Talent Assclown
Mar 11th
Matt Van Horn’s awesomely titled session was packed to capacity this afternoon. Van Horn is Path’s VP of Business, a “no talent assclown” position. He explained how people in those kinds of non-technical roles can help make the lives of engineers and designers easier. Thanks to @visualhero and Unified for the live drawing.
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Live Drawing SXSW: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
Mar 10th
In our last drawn session of the day, Dr. Peter Diamandis shares his vision of an abundant world. The gap between the haves and have nots is staggering, but Dr. Diamandis expects a world of automation, AI and other amazing technologies will create an environment that meets everyone’s needs, abundantly. @visualhero captured the session as it unfolded.
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Live Drawing SXSW: Q&A With Joss Whedon
Mar 10th
As SXSW this afternoon, geek demi-god Joss Whedon took the stage for a Q&A, first with an Entertainment Weekly writer and then with an adoring audience. The conversation jumped from his films, including the upcoming The Avengers, to his creative process, to Firefly (“I keep thinking they’re gonna crunch the numbers and think, oh, we can make money with this! And they don’t. I’d never rule it out.”), and beyond. @visualhero captured the session as it unfolded.
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Live Drawing SXSW: StumbleUpon, the Traffic-Generating Machine
Mar 9th
Earlier this afternoon StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp sat down at SXSW with All Things Digital’s Liz Gannes to talk about a social media company that drives a huge amount of traffic on the social Web. Fun fact: It delivers more than 1 billion personalized recommendations per month. Unified and @visualhero where there to capture the session. (Disclosure: StumbleUpon is one of Unified’s partner for the ongoing drawing coverage of South by Southwest.)
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