Anyone can be an artist, but can your
Android turn you into Picasso?
When it comes to art, you’ve either got the
skills to create some fantastic sketches, or you’ll be struggling to draw a decent
circle without looking stupid.
Can
You Improve Your Drawing Skills With Your Android Device?
We fall in to the latter category. However,
there’s help out there, and the Google Play store has a great selection of
tutorial-based apps to help you learn the tools and tricks needed to become
handy with a pencil and a rubber. For this challenge we’ll be exploring some of
these tutorial-based apps, as well as some of the best sketch apps available
for download to see if you can improve your drawing skills with your Android
device.
Using tutorials
Due to our limited drawing skills, we first
searched around the Google Play store for tutorial-based apps which would teach
us the basics of drawing. The app that we discovered was How to Draw. This app
included a range of tutorials for different aspects of the drawing process.
Whether you wanted to learn about drawing moving figures, or sunsets, the app
covers a wide range of subjects. Each tutorial was done step-by-step, meaning
they’re easy to follow and can be repeated if need be. Where the app is a
problem for budding artists is that all tutorials are shown on a grid, and
although that's helpful at first, 90 per cent of all your future drawings won’t
have a grid for you to use. After following several tutorials, and creating
some resemblance to the on-screen images we were ready to start putting what we
had learned in to effect by looking at some basic sketching apps.
How
to Draw App
You can go back to previous steps within
How to Draw. This feature is particularly useful if you are starting from
scratch, or want to compare your effort to what the tutorial is showing you.
There are plenty of other tutorial-based
drawing apps available for download from the Google Play store. One app you
should also check out is Drawing Tutorial Videos, which does exactly as the
name suggests.
Try not to use a grid on your paper when
you follow one of the tutorials as more often than not you’ll be using blank
paper anyway. The tutorials work in the same way though, but the grids make it
a lot easier to judge lengths of lines and angles.
Practice makes perfect
We took two distinctive approaches to
putting what we had learned in to practice. We first downloaded the Sketch Free
app to put our newly acquired techniques in to practice. The app included a
good variety of brushes and pencils to sketch with, while also enabling us to
save any of our creations, or share them with our contacts.
Learn the basics and then get drawing!
“When you first open Sketch Free, make sure
to just use the basic tools that are available to you, before trying to
incorporate some of the more advanced and complicated items.”
Sketching on a phone is a definite mix bag,
and using a stylus to pinpoint your strokes is a lot better, and easier as it
turns out. We also had problems creating a decent drawing on any device under
four inches, but this probably was down to our ability! We also joined the Draw
Something craze and had a whole lot of fun.
Sketch
Free app
“You can create as many games of Draw
Something as you want. By connecting to a new player you’ll be drawing often
and be able to work on your drawing skills regularly. If the small ranges of
colors that come free with Draw Something don’t completely tickle your fancy,
then you can invest in a wider palette to make your drawings look even more
realistic.”
Advanced techniques
After we had got our head around the basics
of drawing, as well as put some of what we had learned into practice, we wanted
to look at some of the art studios available from the Google Play store. We
first took a look at Magic Doodle, which had a great selection of pencils,
brushes and colors to perfect your drawings. Once again we had the same issue
of trying to use our finger to create a masterpiece, and the app is definitely
best used with a stylus. There are some unique effects within Magic Doodle, and
we especially liked being able to blend different colors together to alter our
creations. The other studio we took a look at was Paint Joy which offered a
smaller selection of brushes and pencils compared to Magic Doodle, but did
include a Gallery mode that recorded the drawings we made step-by-step.
“Most of the advanced art studios on the
Google Play store do require you to pay for them before use. In this case, take
advantage of the 15-minute refund policy.”
Success rating
Verdict: Complete 70%
Well we aren’t going to be the next Picasso
anytime soon, but there are certainly a good variety of tutorials to help you
learn the basics of drawing. The selection of different art studios is also
great, but some are a lot more basic than we would have liked. Also, don’t rely
on your finger to create a decent drawing, and invest in a proper stylus
instead.
