Monday, July 4, 2016

Artecture (A Digital Painting App by Samsung)

Samsung has a digital painting app called Artecture. This app has around 86 brushes in several different categories including pencils, pens, paintbrushes, airbrushes, stamp brushes, and erasers. The pencil category has several different kinds that mimic different types of pencils, the pens have calligraphy styles etc., the paintbrushes have blending oil brushes, the airbrushes have hard and soft edges, and the stamp brushes have patterns or symbols. This app has quite a few tools including a paint bucket, symmetry tools, shape tools such as circles and squares, a selection tool, a color picker, layers, and blending tools. There is also a trace and import photos function. In the layers function you can pick one of 9 background textures, pick a color, or import a photo. A unique feature of this app is a floating brush tool puck. You can add 4 different brush shortcuts on the puck and adjust the size and opacity with sliders. The color picker is in the center of this puck and you can pick the color using the hue and saturation sliders. If you don't want the floating brush puck, you can close it out. Right now this app is completely free with no in app purchases.

This is the UI for Artecture. The brushes   
are on the bottom tool bar and your current selection is shown in the lower left hand corner. Tap on the current selection to bring up the brush settings menu. You can adjust your settings and save them as a new brush.

There are two color pickers. The main one pops out by tapping on the paint bucket. The shortcut color picker is in the middle of the floating puck and is triggered by tapping on it. This changes the puck into the color picker. 


The backgrounds can be changed through the layers function.


The tool menu contains functions for symmetry, shapes, trace, etc. 


"Sparrow"
I created this painting with the Artecture app on my Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 tablet. This app has a lot of nice brushes and they give several textured looks. This makes a good natural media look. I think that I would like a little bit better blending function. I struggled with making a smooth blend for the background and decided to leave it with a textured look. Overall, this is a pretty good app with lots of brushes and features.  

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