The Artist's Eyes by Jenn Lee

My fiance and I decided it was time to upgrade our cell phones. I was upgrading from the LG Vu which was a total touch screen phone and he was upgrading from a Pantech Slate, with qwerty keypad. After a bit of investigating and listening to friends advice, we decided to go with the iPhone 3GS.

The iPhone had won the great debate over which phone was the best phone for us. It may not be the best phone for everyone of course, but that’s why the Cell Phone Companies provide us with so many options. The great debate currently seems to be the iPhone vs the Android. I do have to say I think the Android system is pretty awesome, but currently the amount of applications available is limited vs the iPhone. At some point though…they will definitely compete neck in neck with Apple’s iPhone regarding applications.

With the iPhone 3GS as an artist of photography or drawing, it has so many good applications available for total customization in any interest one wants. My fiance, John Adkins, wrote a great article about  the photography applications he and I like for the iPhone 3Gs. On the arts end, I researched and tested out quite a few applications. I of course started with the free applications (because I am frugal..he-he) and then moved on to the pay applications. Out of my research, I have come up with two art applications that I have to place at the top of my list, Art Studio and Brushes.

With both Art Studio and Brushes, you have complete control over the pencil size, pen size as well as brush size. You have a fully customizable color palette as well as ability to add multiple layers and filters. You wonder how a person draws in detail on such a small canvas? Well you can zoom in to an unbelievable per pixel detail, as well as zoom out so no matter the amount of detail you want in your art, you can zoom into any portion and add the minute details desired. Several other features are smudge, the ability to adjust transparency of colors and line detail as you want. There really are no limits to either of these two applications for your inner artist.

Last but not least in this little review, since my other love besides art is photography, I was pretty happy to see the additional features towards photography, implemented in Art Studio. You can add text, adjust all the same properties of your photos that you can with most photo editors from exposure to contrast, hue to saturation, as well as filters like Gaussian Blur, Emboss, Sepia etc.

I hope you enjoyed my little review of two of my favorite iPhone applications! Below you can see a few screenshots I took of the applications open and a couple of youtube videos that I thought gave good examples of these two apps. As far as I can see, these two apps allow the inner artist to go wherever your eye-phone can see…in this artists eyes.

This first video for Art Studio is primitive in nature. The amount of detail in it’s drawing capabilities is equal to Brushes app. My idea with this video was more intended to show you the features and options in the creation of your masterpiece regardless of the level of the art experience you may have.

This second video is using Brushes. You will want to watch closely as this video is sped up significantly, but I chose it because…well…it’s just awesome! You still get  gist of the features in Brushes, just don’t blink or you might miss them! Oh and as far as the subject matter, yes I admit I am a Star Wars fan…