App Review

I remember the first paint program we had on the family computer.  I would play for hours making circles, squares, patterns, dragging out lines with the mouse and erasing with the click of a button.  The paint app of today's iPad used by artist David Hockney and to the stumbling around in the dark that I did 20 years ago are a universe apart.  I was first introduced to Hockney by my 2-D teacher Daria Kerridge.  She told me about Hockney because of his Polaroid and photo collage pieces like - Merced River,Yosemite Valley, Sept. 1982
Telephone Pole, 1982
Nicholas Wilder Studying Picasso, 1982
Patrick Procktor, Pembroke Studios, London 1982. 

Hockney has been one of Britain's most prolific and renown artist for over 60 years. Over the decades as new technology has come about he has embarrassed it.  With the iPad Hockney has created entire shows exhibiting the pieces he creates using a stylus or his finger.  In one such show he displayed 40 separate iPads on a signal wall, each with a different image.  Some of the iPads would display the creations of his image start to finish in a continuous loop while others just the final piece.   In January of 2013 DAVID HOCKNEY RA: A BIGGER PICTURE was displayed at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.  This show displayed large printouts of his digital images in addition to his large scale oil paintings, some filling entire walls.  Hockney's earlier work has inspired a number of my own art pieces so I wanted to explore the paint apps which might be available for smart phones.

http://vimeo.com/30363451 - this is a short clip of Hockney's pieces being created.

Paint Joy - Free your inner artist - FREE

A wonderful drawing program for all ages to free your imagination and inner artist. Simple, neat while full of possibility.
With Paint Joy, you have full control of brush style, color, brush size, background color etc.
Paint Joy has more than 20 beautiful brushes, such as glow neon, glow, crayon, chalk, sketch etc. You can draw on a color canvas, or decorate any of your photos to make them more beautiful.
The app supports built-in gallery， which saves not only your drawing pictures, but also the drawing animation. You can play back your masterpieces like a small film anytime you want with the "Movie" feature in app.

Despite the smallish size of my phone I had a lot of fun creating this piece.  I had to learn how to use just the tip of my finger.  The variation of lines, colors, color effects, shading or even blocking in sections of color were are fun to play with.  I love working with lines and attempted to create a complex image with just my finger tip.  You can start with blank screen or pull up an existing picture on your phone.  I had two complaints with the app, one, the screen size of my phone was small and I would have liked to work on a larger scale and two, once I downloaded my finished drawing I could no longer play the image.  On the mobile devise you are able to watch mark by make being created.  My computer is not an iPad so I was not able to add the program to my HP laptop.  I was a little disappoint the image looked washed out once it was on my computer as well, it seemed brighter on the phone.  The Eye took me just over two hours to create.


Ideally each of my students would have an iPad to work with and if so they would have a larger surface area to work with/on.  In an interview Hockney said he would make drawing on the sunrise and send them to his friends almost as soon as he created them ten or fifteen people would have access to them and comment on them.  He would do this every day and after a year his friends had hundreds of different images of his original works.  The immediacy for me was the best part of his use of new technology of his new works.

The Eye