Finger Friendly Art Sites

There's nothing better than playing with an art program on an interactive whitboard and literally drawing with your finger. And there are some excellent, free, online drawing packages. Some are quite simple, and others really mimic real-world art materials.

Here are five online drawing applications that I really like;

Sketch
This is a new one that I only discovered today. The brush gives a really realistic effect and you can alter lots of different variables if you want - or just paint away!

As an aside - on this site you will also find a scarily realistic animated spider. It's very impressive and rather scary if spiders are not your thing.

Crayola Digi-Colour
Choose from a variety of Crayola products including crayons, pencils and stamps. If you want to do something more off-line then there are colouring pages to print out as well. The Crayola site also has a lot of information for teachers including lesson plans here.

Bomomo
I wrote about this site a few weeks ago. It's brilliant for making abstract drawings. Some of the pens are really fun.

Imagination Cubed
This has been around a while, but it's still really fun. You can even collaborate with friends on a joint drawing.


NGAKids Brushter
This is a fantastic resource It includes more than forty brushes and customizable size, transparency, texture, and stroke options. A rainbow palette, along with a toolbox of special effects that blur, ripple, smudge, blend, and fragment your designs help make BRUSHster a full-feature painting program. There are many other applications on the site too.

Bomomo

I'm always a fan of online paint packages, especially when they try to be a little different than the standard painting tools. Bomomo is an interesting way of making abstract pictures. The various tools use moving pens that follow roughly where you are clicking, but which move around that point in different ways, and with changing colours.


That's a really bad way of describing it, but have a play and you'll get the idea: http://bomomo.com/

ArtRage

If you own a Promethean board then you might be interested to know that Promethean have teamed up with ArtRage to provide a "Promethean" version of the very cool painting package. I'm not totally sure yet how this version differs from the normal version of Artrage that's available already, but I am trying to find out.

You can download the Promethean version of Artrage here. (more on the Promethean blog)

If you don't own a Promethean board, then you can download the regular, free version of Artrage from the Artrage website here.

If you've never used ArtRage, it gives you the feeling that you are painting with real paint, as oppose to pixels. It's really easy to pick up, even my 3 year old niece had a ball producing abstract art with it! It's fun to use with a mouse, but the addition of an IWB makes for a very different painting experience!

ArtRage Starter Edition gives you 8 painting tools and lets you create, save, and print as many pictures as you like and doesn't limit their size. ArtRage 2.5 Full Edition contains four new paint tools, the ability to paint on multiple layers, metallic paint, stencils and rulers, and a long list of additional features. If you like the starter edition you can upgrade to a full version of the software for about $25.

Art Attack

The other day James, over at Teachers Love Smart Boards, linked to a great online drawing package called Imagination Cubed. Basically its a drawing program that runs in your browser. This is great as it can be used on any brand of IWB irrespective of the software you use on your board.

I'm a scientist, not an artist but I've always enjoyed using art packages on the IWB. I used to play with packages like Painter and Photoshop. Drawing with a mouse, or even a graphics tablet, is a real pain and it is so much easier to be able to paint with my fingers! After all an IWB is only really a HUGE graphics tablet!

A quick trawl around the web led me to a few other interesting drawing packages. There are a lot of them out there covering a range of painting styles. And the best thing is they are free! I love Photoshop but it is rather pricey!

A really nice one is Brushter, which is an abstract painting package. You can choose from a wide range of brush styles and different paint effects. Autocolour chooses a different colour paint each time, which should sound annoying but actually can give a nice abstract effect. You can even click an Auto button and have Brushter generate an abstract image on its own while you watch! Here's a little something I knocked up:

Another one I quite liked is ArtPad. It's much simpler than Brushter and only gives one style of paintbrush. You can choose colours, size and opacity though. Like Imagination cubed you can replay your painting from start to finish.

Finally, there is the much simpler online Colouring-in pages at TheKidszPage.com. You can choose from a range of different line drawings to then colour in. Again this is not as powerful as the Brushter one, but foundation pupils will love colouring in the pictures with their fingers!