Tiny Art

This is a quick little post to mention the joy of a lovely piece of free software for any who have a Nintendo DS and homebrew card. It's called Colors and it's from www.collectingsmiles.com a lovely website name if ever there was one. The software leverages the DS's portability and it's pressure sensitive touch screen to make the perfect tiny pocket sketch book. It takes a little getting used to because the screen is so small but it's really quite delightful to have these tiny little jewel like painting sketches appear in front of you as you scribble away.

One of the other nice features is that the program stores each brushstroke as you make it resulting in an animation playback facility where you can watch the whole painting being drawn from scratch. It's quite instructive to see how I work. I had always thought that I obsessed over a single detail until I liked it before moving onto the next but from watching the few sketches that I've done I seem to flit about the image from place to place tweaking things as they catch my eye. I really didn't think I worked like that.

Here's a couple of sketches I did yesterday and if I can work out how to make a movie of the process of painting one I'll try and upload that too at some point: