Pixiq

Well those of you who have been following my latest rants, have read about how the IPhone became a life saver in more emergent times, when my son, experienced a stroke. (He has since had a miraculous recovery;-) Since then, I have heard from lots of people on the Internet, many of whom are amazing artists doing incredible things with their IPhones and IPads, some not so urgently medical.

I waited a long time before getting the IPhone- truthfully, I was waiting for Verizon to finally offer it to its customers; but then the damned Droid came out and from all the reviews, it stole all the thunder from the IPhone and was rated as a better phone. Well, that really threw a monkey's wrench into my decision making. But since I am all about everything Mac, but use Google for my mail and calendar, I had to have something that did both. The IPhone outpaced the Droid because the IPad2 was looming near and I had canvassed to have the IPad2 at work for both my clinical and educational settings. And I am thrilled that I bought the IPhone. It is all about those apps (from medical use to artistic) that make me one happy camper.

So recently, I downloaded the free version of the app SketchMee, and found a way to "save" the SketchMee images to my IPhone by emailing it to myself and then adding it to my camera within the phone- while the size is smaller than the non-free app, it's perfect for transforming your photographic images into sketches on the go using your phone.

It's not quite as sophisticated as Paintbook 3.2 or some of the non-free apps, but it struck me that anyone can now turn his or her camera images into high quality art without a Wacom tablet and/or program such as Painter 11, which I covered in my forthcoming book through Pixiq (Digital Image Transfer: Creating Art with Your Photography).

So while I still LOVE using all my software programs from Studio Artist to Artmatic to Painter, I have to admit that once the IPad bundles the ability to download software (the same way it has bundled Photoshop with the IPad2 version), well it will be a whole new world out there. In years to come, the tablet, with any luck, may just have a port or two so you can work off a portable hard drive (like my lovely Lacie Rugged) or spew your photos / artistic images out onto some server in cyberspace. Soon enough, I keep telling myself, along with praying for Scotty to "beam me up".

As always, keep playing and light on ....