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.

Finger Friendly Websites

Last week I was at a college running a session on how to use a Smartboard. One of the questions I was asked was if I knew of any good 'finger-friendly' websites that I could recommend. I demonstrated a few during the course, but this got me thinking about producing a decent list of these kind of websites.



What I wanted was to list sites that work well with a finger (but also with an IWB pen) and were very interactive. As I started going through my delicious links I realised I had quite a lot of sites that met this criteria. Current count is about 50 of them, far too many than for just one blog post.

If you want to see the whole list, I have gone through my delicious links and tagged anything that fits the bill with the tag "fingerfriendly" - you can see the whole list here; http://delicious.com/dannynic/fingerfriendly

I'll try and produce some blog posts that summarise some of the best for different subjects. Watch this space.