Animation & Drawing Apps
Most of my digital art has been done on Photoshop using a Cintiq tablet connected to the computer. But in order to teach children digital painting, it would be helpful to know about free apps they can easily access than pay for Adobe Cloud.
While the Photoshop program on the computer allows you to buy or create your own brushes, the Adobe Sketch is every limited and not as varied in brush choices. Brushes Redux, on the other hand, has surprisingly a great range of brushes you can use for digital painting.
The computer interface for Photoshop allows for animation, but the app does not. Yet, Flip A Clip is a nice easy program that allows you to create short 2D animations. It also allows you to link to youtube to show your animations.
However, all these new apps would work much better on a tablet rather than a phone. Drawing with my finger on the iPhone is just not the same due to a lack of surface space and less control. Unfortunately, my apple tablet is from 2013, which does not work with these new apps. So, I’m in the market for a new tablet. In the meantime, I am playing with the apps on my phone to test them out.
Extended Reality (XR) Apps
AR and VR programs have been in development since the ’90s. Some programs are designed better than others. The Acute app was not a great interface and felt glitchy in some areas. The Activator was a better interface and overall worked better as an app. The XR App should enable the user to feel immersed in a virtual reality. However, I did not experience complete immersion. I did find the Just A line, which also uses AR technology much more immersive mainly because it is more playful, allowing you to doodle “in outer space.”
The only other AR app that I have been immersed in is Pokemon Go which is one of the AR apps that have gone viral. Even though Pokemon has a huge fan base on its own, and was a popular game before the AR version, the AR version took the game to another level. It also helped that the structure of the Pokemon games was suited for AR. But XR is still in development, and more and more companies are developing their own programs. Whether these programs will be demonstrating great technology or great design is yet to be seen.