Brushes for iPhone

23.06.2009
For artists, painting on location has always meant packing up brushes, paint, and a canvas and easel to take along for the trip. This whole process took time and planning, not leaving much room for sudden inspiration. With from , whenever inspiration hits, all you need is an iPhone or iPod touch and your finger.

Brushes is a $5 mobile studio in your pocket that lets you sketch or paint anywhere, anytime. Recently, , creating quite a buzz. There is even a , and some of the images are truly amazing.

The opening screen of Brushes features a gallery where you store your masterpieces; it comes loaded with a few sample paintings done by different artists. You can view all your paintings here and even play a slide show of them.

To create a new painting, you can either start from scratch or load a picture from your photo album to paint over. There are three different brushes to choose from, ranging from smooth to rough. You can choose the size of your brushes, starting at 1-pixel in diameter and going all the way up to 64 pixels. When I first considered painting on the iPhone, I couldn't imagine being able to paint any real details with a finger, but being able to zoom in to 800-percent combined with a brush tip as small as 1-pixel wide makes it completely possible.

There is also a paint bucket tool to quickly fill the canvas in with any color. Brushes has an excellent color picker in the form of a color wheel. Rather than a set of swatches to pick from, the color wheel allows you to select virtually any color imaginable. Once you've selected a color, there is also a slider to make your pick lighter or darker--that makes it much easier to paint shadows and highlights.

Brushes also supports transparency, letting you layer up your brushstrokes to achieve some really great effects. An eyedropper tool lets you pick any color from your painting. You quickly access the tool by tapping and holding a finger down on the screen; once the eyedropper pops up, you just slide it over the color you want and let go.