Colors! Painting App for iPhone and iPod Touch

Colors! is a painting app which was originally created for the Nintendo DS and later released for the iPhone and iPod touch. In features, it lags behind most other similarly priced apps in this category, but it does have a nifty art viewer that lets you play back other users' creations and upload your own artwork for others to view and vote on. I'd recommend getting Colors! Lite, the free version that will let you explore the gallery and check out the painting capabilities, before you spring for the paid app.

Colors! is rather limited in features compared to similarly-priced painting apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. It was originally designed for the Nintendo DS, and I suspect this contributes somewhat to its limitations since that device uses a stylus rather than a touch screen.

All painting controls are contained on a single screen, which is nice. But painting options are very limited. There is no eraser tool, no layers, no photo import, and the brush is limited to a soft or hard round brush. Painting in Colors! feels more like drawing with markers than working with paint.

You can adjust the brush size and opacity and choose from 4 different brush styles. The first two let you change brush size or opacity on the fly by tilting your device as you paint. I found this very difficult to control. The third brush paints with a limited amount of color which fades out to nothing as you paint. This is always a set amount; you can't control the amount of paint that is loaded in the brush. The last brush is a simple continuous size and opacity. The initial size and opacity can be adjusted, and there is a soft or hard option for each brush.

Like other painting apps, you can touch and hold on the screen to pick up colors from your canvas, and you pinch and spread to zoom in or out. Unfortunately, the zoom in Colors! is very choppy. There are only four levels of zoom, and your brush size does not scale with the zoom. I suppose this can be a positive if you are zooming in to work on details, but it is unusual. Colors! also displays a distracting animation when the device is rotated (but the app itself doesn't change orientation).

Your drawings can be saved within the app, but even this is more tedious than it should be. You can export your drawing to your device's storage or to email in three different sizes, up to 1280x1760 pixels. It's nice that this can be done directly in the app, instead of requiring a desktop application.

One of the best things about Colors! is not its painting features, but the gallery where you can browse, download, play back, and rate other users' art work. I spent hours browsing and playing back the paintings in the gallery. You can also play back paintings from the Colors! web site if you don't have an iPhone, iPod touch or Nintendo DS. The web site will show you which platform each painting was created on. It's impressive to see the level of detail some users have achieved with a touch screen and the limited features in Colors! for iPhone.

I don't recommend Colors! for the painting features, but if you are looking to be inspired and learn new techniques by watching the creative process of others, grab Colors! Lite for free and check out the gallery. It'll also give you a chance to try out the painting capabilities to see if you like it enough to pay for the full version.

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