Over the Christmas break, someone in my Facebook feed shared a YouTube video of artist Seikou Yamaoka recreating “The Girl With A Pearl Earring” using an iPad. Before I go on, you should watch it too, just for the sheer beauty of it.
Amazing, isn’t it?
So I went to the App Store and searched for ArtStudio and was astounded to find essentially a $5 version of Photoshop. Seriously, layers, dodge, burn, color picker, export in .psd format, all the “Adjust” menus you can think of, filters… everything I ever used back when I had Photoshop, plus a bit more.
I spent most of a day playing with different paint brushes, specifying just exactly how wet they were, or how much lead and follow opacity I wanted. My little nephew spent long stretches of time on it and even learned to change colors on his own.
Mr 2 using “special pen on iPad”
I used a photo of my sister’s new family room to help choose new curtain colors for them. (The original curtains are pink, which, no.)
Red? Grey? Definitely red.
I used a photograph of my parents’ church to design a logo for them.
Building a logo from a picture.
I’m certainly no Seikou Yamaoka, but it’s wonderful to have such a powerful and intuitive art app.
Now, if only GIMP could figure out how to make itself as intuitive, I’d have a desktop image making/manipulation application… Sigh.