Myoats is a free online drawing application and community. While there are many free drawing and painting applications available, both online and for download, Myoats offers a rather different user experience. This is a very stylishly presented application and, while the tool set may at first seem limited, it has been carefully considered to allow the production of intricate and high quality reflected designs.
Highlights of Myoats
Myoats is an individualistically styled free online drawing application with a number of nice features.
- Free to register
- Save your work to your account or download
- Automatically produces your work as an iPhone wallpaper if desired
- Very intuitive user interface
- Complex and intricate designs and patterns can be produced
Why Use Myoats
Myoats does allow users to draw simple two color line drawings, but it isn't perhaps the best tool available for such simple illustrations. Where it really shines is in producing patterns that reflect drawn elements and/or apply them to up to 16 sides. This makes creating extremely intricate and multi-faceted designs very straight forward. The results can be very reminiscent of what you would see in a child's kaleidoscope. A process of simple trial and error can produce some fascinating results. It is genuinely fun just to play with the various tools and settings and see what you come up with and in this respect it rather reminds me of Livebrush.
The site also includes a community element meaning that users can share their designs and vote on other users' work. Looking through some of the work produced by other users can be very inspirational and show you just how advanced some of the results can be.
Myoats is ideally suited to designers looking to produce work for use on monitors as the maximum download resolution is 1960 x 1030 pixels. This should be suitable for most web designers, however it would be possible for vector artists with a little experience to trace a downloaded PNG file to give the option of using a design at larger sizes. This tracing a bitmap in Inkscape tutorial shows how to use Inkscape's Trace feature to do just that, though if you've time, you could trace a design by hand.
Limitations of Myoats
Myoats currently only allows you to draw your design in one color and while some might consider that a limitation, it could perhaps also be argued as being a feature. It means that users have to focus fully on the shape of their drawing, rather than using color to add interest, though there is the option to vary opacity.
Another possible restriction for some users is that you can only download your work in PNG format. As mentioned earlier, this should be fine for designers wanting to use their designs online or in onscreen applications, but does limit the usefulness for print use. The maximum download size would only print at less than six and a half inches by three and a half inches at 300dpi.
Help and Support
Myoats is a very intuitive free online drawing application and is very easy to get started with. However you may find that after a while you want to understand more about getting the most from it and there is some support available on the site. The How to Create page offers a rounded overview of the application with all tools and features covered in bite size explanations. There is also a page of video tutorials covering using the tools and downloading images. If something hasn't been covered in these two sections, users can post questions in the forum though you can't always be sure to get a response.
You can try out Myoats for your self at the Myoats website.