Digital Tools

The Nintendo DS homebrew scene is growing and more and more useful applications appear. Today we will have a look on two interesting drawing applications. Both follow the approach of "digital painting". This technique however use bold and blurred brushes you certainly know from Photoshop: Pictures made with this technique really look like painted pictures if done right. Please look at the digital paintings of Mathias Snygg and this amazing tutorial to get into success with this technique. I think a solid background in drawing and painting will be very useful to heighten the quality your pictures - also on the DS.

Colors!

The first application is Colors!, that was developed by Jens Andersson. He solved the questions of usability, GUI and constrains versus flexibility very well. Besides a clear color-selector and the basic drawing functions there are also nice little features like mirroring the picture or watching an instant replay form the painting you made. You can use up to 9 slots to save pictures and replay data as well on your flash-memory or SD card. Note that you can retrieve the data on your PC to reuse or work with the data you made on your portable gaming console.

Phidias

Quite a similar application is Phidias programmed by the Finnish coder Tassu. Phidias has some more functions like colors!, for example smudge or blur. Also in addition you can save your pictures under self selected filenames. The straightforwardness of Phidias is not as high as on Colors!, but both applications are good additions to the homebrew scene to make the Nintendo DS a compact and versatile mobile tool. So let your own taste decide. The ability on both applications to save the pictures makes this good tools for preparing pictures stylo-driven to re-use them afterwards on Mac or PC.

Phidias Webpage
http://sivullinen.fi/nds/