Nintendo DS-an alternative mobile paint platform
19:00 in iAMDA News, Nintendo DS by Pierre Fontaine
The Nintendo DS family of products makes for an interesting platform for the mobile digital artist. The two versions of the DS that are of most interest to the mobile artist are the original DS and the DS Lite. The reason for this is twofold. First, the original DS and DS Lite both have an undocumented pressure sensitive screen, which the latter models do not have.
Secondly, these two consoles started a wave of “homebrew” applications, designed by independent developers and not licensed by Nintendo. These homebrew applications required a special game cart and micro SD card, easily purchased over the internet, that allow programs to be installed and run on the DS as if they were fully licensed Nintendo games. Nintendo caught wind of this development and fearing widespread piracy of their games, tried to squash the ability to run homebrew apps in their latter DSi consoles.
One such homebrew app was Colors. The developer of Colors discovered that the two original DS models have pressure sensitive touch screens and created a paint app to take advantage of this remarkable feature. Suddenly, an artist could use the DS and have full control over both the size of their brush and its opacity based on the amount of pressure placed on the screen. Take a look at their website (http://colors.collectingsmiles.com/) for samples of the amazing work still being done with the great app.
The newest version of Colors now has a natural brush to use in addition to the “hard” and “soft” brushes that originally came with the app. Also, Colors has the ability to re-render your painting at a higher resolution so that you aren’t tied to the limited screen resolution. Here’s a sample painting I did that was re-rendered to a higher resolution.
Recently, Nintendo released the game “Art Academy”. Essentially a series of very nicely produced painting lessons, Art Academy gives the user a very nice selection of pencils and paints to use. The Pencil selections allow for fine line work and shading. The Paint selections provide the user with three round brush and three flat brush sizes. In addition, you can control the amount of paint on the brush as well as how diluted the paints can be by adding “water” to the brush. Reference images that you’ve photographed with your DSi can be loaded or else use some of the built in photographs if you are using the earlier DS models.
Art Academy retails for $19.99 and works very nicely. One drawback to Art Academy is that the paint engine does not take advantage of the early DS models pressure sensitive screens so there’s no ability to alter opacity and line thickness on the fly.
Here’s an image I’ve done with Art Academy that give you an idea of what you can achieve:
The biggest drawback of the DS line as a mobile artist’s platform is their size and bulk. They are easily carried in a pocket but they are certainly bulkier than an cell phone, most of which now have cameras and apps that do similar things to what these two DS apps can do. Once again, the biggest advantage to the earlier DS models is their pressure sensitive screens. Hopefully, the next generation of cel phones and iDevices will offer this wonderful capability!
For more samples of what you can achieve on the Nintendo platform and these two apps, please visit my website at http://pierrefontaine.webs.com/apps/photos/album?albumid=9677463
superb post. I only learned (mostly through Thierry Schiel) after I started painting on the iPhone, that mobile art has been around for quite a while and ever since there have been powerful enough mobile devices. colors is one of the most amazing apps out there, and as far as I know there’s also been some decent apps on early windows mobile devices. I really like the Art Academy painting you did.
Thanks for the very kind comments. As you’ve probably guessed, I’ve got an old Pocket PC loaded with paint and music programs as well. Amazingly, these pocket devices have been around much longer than Apple’s iDevices but didn’t catch on with the general public.
I’ve just been watching Apple’s roll-out for the new iPad2 and Steve Jobs is really the master at selling technology. I’m watching and thinking that I’d love to get an iPad. $4.99 for iMovie or for GarageBand! The film-maker and composer in me says that this is a very tempting proposition.
However, when I do the math I realize that I’m contemplating a nearly $600 purchase if I want the low-end model plus accessories. For someone who doesn’t want to incur credit card debt and is trying to raise a family on a meager middle class income, an iPad seems like a king’s ransom rather than a bargain.
I’ve always been a lover of low-cost alternatives to high priced items, which is why I’ve been an avid Ebay lurker for years now. One person’s discarded technology is another person’s dream come true!
I was interested to see – or rather hear – yesterday at the iPad2 intro that Garage Band for the new iPad has pressure sensitivity at least for sound. I’m wondering if that could translate to painting….
Very interesting piece about Nintendo, Pierre. Thank you. (I too used to do paintings on a Pocket PC. I’m a mini-gadget freak!)
Regarding pressure sensitivity on the iPad 2, the technique apparently uses the device’s accelerometer. Since all iDevices have an accelerometer, all keyboard based music apps could be adapted to take advantage of this pseudo-pressure sensitivity.
There was a piano app for the iPhone over a year ago that did in fact increase the volume of the piano sound when the on-screen keyboard was struck with more force. I’m not certain what happened to that app but perhaps Apple is now using the same technique that this app employed.
The only problem I see with regards to pressure sensitive painting apps is the way the screen is used in a music app as opposed to a paint app. A piano key is struck once producing a sound at a specific volume. The accelerometer could easily understand that one hit and alter the volume of a note.
Painters need something else. There’s the initial “hit” of brush to canvas (or screen) but then we also would want the accelerometer to continue to read the pressure applied after the brush is dragged across the screen. I’m not certain any accelerometer could read that kind of continuous pressure change and vary the stroke width and opacity to suit.
Then again, I could be wrong and hopefully someone is working on that problem as we speak.