For anyone who loves to mess around with painting, Collecting Smiles has put out this great little homebrew app for the Nintendo DS. You will of course need a compatible flash card for your DS or DSi such as the R4i SDHC, available at our shop at www.dscardworld.com. Follow along the video and [...]]]>

For anyone who loves to mess around with painting, Collecting Smiles has put out this great little homebrew app for the Nintendo DS. You will of course need a compatible flash card for your DS or DSi such as the R4i SDHC, available at our shop at www.dscardworld.com. Follow along the video and you’ll be creating great colour sketches in no time.

Colors is a fairly sophisticated paint program, and it’s a lot more useful than it seems on the surface – it’s much easier for me to carry around than a pack of markets or an expensive tablet laptop. For that reason, it’s turned a DSi into a very useful portable easel.

The controls are very well thought out: the top and bottom buttons on the D-Pad are used to zoom in and out. The right button gives you an eyedropper tool to select colours, and the left D-pad allows you to move around your canvas (particularly useful if you’ve zoomed in).

Most importantly, these controls are actually mirrored in the A B X Y controls on the right – so it’s suitable for both left and right handed artists.

Holding down the L button gives you a screen that allows you to choose color, hue and lightness. The wheel, similar to that in Corel programs of the past, allows you to choose a color. The triangle in the middle controls both lightness and situation.

There are also two useful sliders on the right of this screen – one to choose brush size, and another to choose opacity. You can also choose a hard or soft edged brush to achieve different effects in your art.

Using lighter pressure on the DS or DSi creates lighter brush strokes as well which gives a fantastic pressure-sensitive effect. This will allow you to add some good depth to your artwork.

The only catch with the program is that there doesn’t seem to be an eraser tool – so a useful skill to learn is using the eyedropper tool to select colors to re-paint over a particular area.

Finally, the Playback function is unbelievably cool – you can see how you painted your artwork stroke by stroke – from blank canvas to completion!

The software is available here on the official site:
Colors!

Pick up your flash cards here:
DS Card World

Hope you enjoyed our review! Let us know what you think of our video as well.

All the best,
The DSCardWorld Team