Tablet Insight Paints a Picture: From Touchscreen to Finger Painting

Art on your iPad? This week I’m taking a look at the rising use of tablets for drawing, painting, doodling, designing, illustrating, sketching—you name it and you can do it. As we see, there is no shortage of creativity when it comes to making your work of art and sharing it with the world.

Mobile Painting

The revolutionary iPad touchscreen is one of the big movers of getting tablet painting creativity energized. With the easy to use iTunes store application Brushes, people are using their fingertips to create artworks that are astonishingly impressive.



Not only a great portrait but also what a great stand! This guy certainly has a more professional iPad case model than what you might want if you’re just doodling away. Check out one of Tablet2cases great folio cases & tablet stands . They will prop up your iPad like an easel and allow you to use both fingers for maximum output. Paint the sunset at 6pm and send it to your friend by 7pm.

Finger Painted Apps

But maybe you have higher aspirations? Maybe you are the next Van Gogh of the digital age? Some people have been taking their iPad-made artwork and turning it into a one-of-a-kind user experience. Katana Jack by Xoan Balthar of Ivanovich Games is a free download and is THE FIRST game painted entirely on an iPad (how often can you be ‘the first’ at anything in the digital world?).

If you are painting a lot on the go (like, landscapes, city street corners, etc), you may want to look into one of our tablet protectors —they give you some extra grip on the back of your tablet so you can easily have one hand free for the doodling without worrying about the iPad slipping from your other hand.

Snoop Dogg + iPad Brush?

With the iPad you are able to not only paint, but you can also animate. You may have even seen this kind of art work popping up in your favorite videos—check out the "making of" video clip for Blush's new song, "Undivided" featuring Snoop Dogg. The entire video was made on an iPad using the Brushes app. Pretty incredible.

Draw With Friends

If you just want something a bit more fun and amateur, there also some cool apps, like NetSketch, that allows you to do collaborative drawing with friends—the app picks up any other Netsketch app user in range and connects your devices. Great if you have some kids and a long car ride ahead of you for the holidays.



Right now it is only for the iPhone, so maybe we’ll see it get to the tablet phase sometime soon (hopefully!).

Some people may want to argue and say that this new technology is ‘too easy’ and that ‘digital art is not art’! I guess we’ll have to wait until this new tablet trend transforms into a museum-curated exhibition to finally get a stamp of approval from ‘high art’ culture. But until then, if people are enjoying a little extra art and creativity in their life, who’s to argue against that?

Tablet Insight is a weekly column by Thomas Andersen that focuses on the innovative tablet uses and considers what is the most compatible and necessary tablet case.