Brushes from Steve Sprang Review

We first heard of the Brushes application when we saw an artist had painted the front cover of the New York Times using an iPhone application. What was really amazing was the natural texture of the artwork, the ability of the software to look organic and less digital.

Brushes comes with three brushes out of the box, that can be changed in size. Full compliments of colors are available and full translucency is also available to allow a very nice way to mix colors for the organic look and feel.

At the first load, you are shown your photo gallery, which includes 4 paintings and any paintings that you may have already worked on. A small icon at the bottom left of the interface resembles the common RSS icon, actually starts a temporary server on your device to allow you to use a web browser, point to the IP address brushes tells you, and viola, you can view and download the artwork that is store in your gallery. The addition of this simple server is simply a brilliant idea that we were not expecting to be included but are thankful it was.

Painting couldn't be simpler, choose a brush, a brush size and a color, then finger paint. Tracking was amazingly accurate and brushes could track pretty fast movement without resorting to polygon line issues as the software and hardware fight to interpret the path you took, verses the nearest line.

Changing colors is a snap, choose the eyedropper tool, and a donut ring color picker can be moved around the screen and as you move over each color, the donut changes to that color. Once you let go, you have selected the color. Hold your finger down at any time and the color picker is automatically under your finger for quick and easy color selection.

The three brushes are very organic, the first is a round tipped brush, the second has a slight organic texture and the third has more texture. All brushes can size from thin to a pretty decent size.

Brushes also has multi leveled undo. I did not feel like the undo was restricted and I could undo my images and redo them without feeling like I was at the edge of my memory space and couldn't use it, but that was not the case.

You have a primitive fill tool, but no fill to line, or fill between lines, which would have been a very welcomed additional tool.

Navigation, pan and zoom was very intuitive, where pinch and pull zooms in and out, and a two finger drag moves the image around the work space, much like other iPod Touch and iPhone applications. You can zoom in to a very nice size and get some detail work done

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Brushes is a truly brilliant application, and only falls short on a few areas. It would have been wonderful for a cut and paste option, but if Apple themselves have not worried of adding a cut and paste functionality we cant hold it against Steve Sprang for not including it. A few more brushes will be nice, but 3 really was enough as they cover most needs.

Brushes has quite a community following, and it will be very interesting to see what the community creates.