art – A Mind Running Wild

In my last post I talked up the iPad a bit. That device and some of it’s apps and accessories in particular do have some major advantages over the competition, but I wanted to share some of the experiments I did prior to getting an iPad to show that the tablet form factor in general has some nice potential.

Adult Coloring books, art therapy coloring books, or mandala coloring books – they have lots of names I guess – have gotten popular. There are most certainly good arguments for why doing this coloring with physical medium is advantageous, but there are also some very nice ways that this coloring stuff translates onto tablet platforms. Here are some items my kids did and were really proud of.

In terms of skill building there was some good discussion related to color theory, and they got valuable experience with color digital color picking mechanisms.

Some of the art therapy aspect is about the process, but a nice result is rewarding too of course. Not to put down any kids potential, but these pictures printed out were a very nice product that no one would reasonably expect a young kid to be able to do with physical paper and markers.

On the other hand, one of my sons is pretty diligent about coloring and did manage to finish a pretty cool color by number

Anyway, beyond coloring there are some decent apps for doing drawing, painting, and animation on Android apps. I really wanted to balance my last post so that I don’t give the impression that if people want to do digital art they should go buy an iPad.

Here is one example I did quickly while experimenting with a good passive stylus [something like this] (which after using for a bit I very much recommend BTW)