30 drawing apps in 30 days- day 18 pixelmator

Pixelmator is a full fat drawing app, with layers, more brushes (in infinitely variable sizes and opacities) than you shake a stick at, a wealth of colours, which you can select from hex codes, and the ability to make your own palettes.

The pinch to zoom works as expected, there's a proper undo button, and the only over sensitive touch control is the tap and hold colour picker which gets a bit too helpful if you are drawing dots.

There's a bunch of filters, and effects, and a built in help function.

The only real complaint is that the menu system for picking brushes is a bit too menu-ey, you click the paintbrush, and the the brush type, and then pick the brush, and then click on the size/opacity controls, and then pick your colour... it's a bit long winded.

I briefly used the desktop version of Pixelmator on my mac back when I was doing the weekly webcomic, it loaded quickly, and worked reliably, but didn't work any better than Photoshop so I reverted to that. I can see pixelmator on the ipad is probably much like that, it's fine, but if you are already settled using sketchbook or something else, you are unlikely to switch, unless you are a big fan of brushes, which it has in abundance.

Today's challenge was to draw cords, so I opted for a Geography teacher on a field trip..

Export to png, jpg or psd, save to photos, open in another app etc...

I was slightly concerned when I started the app that it would be a memory hog like Artset, as it warned me I only had 1Gb of memory free on my iPad, but that doesn't seem to have been an issue.

30 drawing apps in 30 days day 6 - Brushes (Redux)

As mentioned previously the first drawing app I bought on my old iPod touch was Brushes. There was quite a lot of hoohah at the time that such fantastic drawing could be accomplished on your phone, but I found it almost completely useless,even with a pogo stylus . The pogo stylus was at that time the ONLY stylus available, and it was a horrid little stick with a lump of crackly foam on the end.

Despite the hype I dont think many peopl actally produced anything with Brushes.

Anyway, as I'm working through the apps I have I gave it a second look, but this time, on an iPad air, with it's far larger retina screen... and you know what it's not that bad.

It does exactly whatit says in the name, and allows you to create brushes, and as long as you bear that in mind, and use it to paint, with a brush and don't try and draw its fine.

The brush settings are very comprehensive, and it all works quite nicely, there is a bit a gesture sensitivity if you try to do small close strokes, which it interprets as wanting to use the colour picker (the opposite of the problem with Autodesk mobile sketchbook X)

It has multiple layer support,can import and export to a folder ondropbox as jpg, png, native brushes format OR psd, which is useful.

It automatically records the drawing process and turns it into a video clip.

Anyway, today's challenge theme was 'moon' which can't be right... that's no moon...