The Bottom Line
Pros
- Extensive in-app help and tips get you up and running quickly.
- Painting offset lets you move the cursor away from your finger so you can see what you are painting.
- Shake the device to toggle between a loaded brush or a dry brush.
- Desktop exporter for Windows and Macintosh exports your paintings at higher resolutions.
Cons
- No layers feature.
- Limited to 100 paintings you can save in the gallery.
Description
- Paint with wet oil paint or a dry brush using four kinds of brushes: flat, round, fan, or palette knife.
- Adjust brush size, paint load amount, brush rotation, and pressure.
- Choose rectangular (320 x 480) or square (480 x 480) canvas, and export up to 2880 x 2880 pixels with Inspire Exporter.
- Full color picker. Choose from color wheel or swatches of recently-used colors. Paint transparency can be adjusted.
- 200 levels of undo and redo.
- Pinch or spread to zoom in or out up to 3200%. Drag with two fingers to move the canvas.
- Import photos from device. Imported pictures can be positioned, rotated, and scaled.
- Save up to 100 paintings in the app's gallery. Export paintings to Photos, or email them as PNG files.
- Menu rotates with your device for portrait or landscape painting.
- Inspire is regularly priced at US$4.99 from the iTunes App Store.
Guide Review - Inspire Painting App for iPhone and iPod touch
Inspire lets you work with a canvas size of 320 by 480 pixels or 480 by 480 pixels on your handheld device. The desktop Inspire Exporter application for Windows and Mac OS X allows you to export your art work as high resolution JPEG or PNG files up to 2880 by 2880 pixels. Inspire does not offer a layering feature, but you can import photos from your device as the basis for a painting.
Like most iPhone drawing apps, you drag with your finger on the screen to paint, touch and hold to pick up a color from your canvas, and tap the screen to open the menu, where you can undo/redo, choose colors, choose a brush, adjust brush options, and so on. 200 levels of undo/redo are available, and your paintings can be duplicated at any time.
Inspire's brush options include brush size, paint load amount, automatic reload, rotation, and pressure. As you paint with Inspire you'll be going back and forth between the Brush Selection, Brush Usage, and Paint Color screens. Most users will want to enable Flickable Settings in the options, so you can flip between these three screens quickly.
One of the unique features of Inspire is the dry brush toggle--give your device a quick shake and it toggles between a brush loaded with paint, or a dry brush which can be used for blending. It would be nice to have a gesture-based toggle for this, because the shaking can become tedious after a while. Another interesting feature is the alternate mode of the palette knife, which simulates using the corner of a palette knife to scrape paint off the canvas.
It was a joy using Inspire on my 3rd generation iPod touch, and I had no issues with it. I recommend this app if you like to doodle, sketch, or paint. The addition of layers would put it into the "killer app" category, but it's still a great app even without a layers feature. Visit the KiwiPixel web site for more information, screen shots, and an art gallery.
