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Digital artists take the spotlight at the Nomad Brush booth
Mike Schramm looked at the Nomad Flex in October, and he liked it as a tool for aspiring artists to use. I stopped by their booth at Macworld/iWorld 2013 on Thursday, and a bunch of those aspiring artists were clustered around iPads to try the brush out. The US$29.99 Flex is the star of the booth, as it has a synthetic soft brush tip and comes in five colors. Along with all of the demo units, Nomad has also recruited a number of iPad-based digital artists to discuss their work this week in the booth. I spoke with Sumit Vishwakarma, who led a tech talk on Thursday about creating art on the iPad. Vishwakarma is also offering classes that teach artists how to integrate digital techniques with traditional art. They're also giving advice to booth visitors, which is really a nice bonus for anyone who stops by. If you're heading to the expo on Saturday, take a moment to go hands-on with a Nomad Brush and get in touch with your inner artist.
The Nomad Flex paintbrush stylus will let you paint on a touchscreen (as well as you already can)
We've talked about the Nomad Brush before -- it's a capacitive paintbrush stylus that's designed to be used on a touchscreen canvas, letting you paint across your iPad's (or iPhone's, though the size of that screen makes it a little tougher) touchscreen with your favorite art-making app. Now, Nomad has introduced a new brush they call the Flex, which has a new synthetic brush tip to use, and comes in what seems to me like a slightly longer size (though that may just be my bad memory). The Flex is available to the public starting this week, and Nomad kindly sent a couple along to TUAW for us to try out and review. In short, the verdict is that this is just another tool for aspiring artists to use. If, like me, you can't draw much more than a stick figure with a smiley face, a house and some of those M-shaped birds, then the Flex won't make you a much better artist. It might make you feel like one, at least, because the brush's capacitive tip does respond quite well to the iPad's screen. I used the Autodesk Sketchbook app to do some test painting, and when I first started, I mashed the brush down on the screen like a standard stylus, pressing it in and then swiping it around. With a little bit of practice, though, I found that the brush would register on the screen at even the slightest touch, so that when I stopped thinking about it as a stylus and started thinking about the interaction as paint on a canvas, it actually worked fairly well. Again, I have zero experience with real painting outside of what I did in kindergarten, but I do get the impression that in the hands of someone who knows how to wield a paintbrush, the Nomad Flex would be very useful. As I discussed with the Nomad's makers earlier this year, there are a few drawbacks to a brush like this. First, Nomad itself doesn't make a painting app to work with the brush: They recommend a few, but you're essentially using third-party apps of your own choice, and those each come with certain issues and features of their own. Painters used to blending colors and the physical properties of paint may obviously find problems with digital painting apps, and the paint on screen may not move around they're used to seeing paint on canvas move. For someone already used to holding a paintbrush while making art, however, the Nomad Flex seems like an excellent tool. I do have one hitch, actually. In Sketchbook, you will sometimes need to just touch on the screen for the app's UI, in order to change around the brush's color, for example, or switch up your brush's width. I instinctively turned the Nomad brush around, thinking that there'd be a capacitive stylus on the opposite end of it. But no dice -- the brush ends in what seems like a metallic stub that could tap on or even crack your screen if it hits hard enough. It seems to me like a no-brainer to turn the other end into a standard stylus, but Nomad hasn't done that for some reason. Just for the heck of it, I also tried using the Flex for something it's not designed for: Playing the great line-drawning game Jack Lumber. I scored fairly well in the level I played, but I have to admit that by the end of it, I preferred the familiar feeling (and responsiveness) of dragging my finger across the screening. Painting with the brush allows you to be a little more expressive, but games, it seems, are designed for a good old hand-attached digit. That silliness aside, the Nomad Flex is a great stylus paintbrush, and if you're a painter who prefers swiping some fibers across the screen rather than your own finger, at $29.99, I would definitely recommend trying it out for sure.
Kickstart the Flow: a capacitive touchscreen paintbrush
It must be stylus month on Kickstarter, with first the Cosmonaut and now the Flow appearing on the funding website. Like the Nomad Brush, the Flow by Joystickers is modeled after a paintbrush. The Flow has capacitive bristles rather than the traditional foam tip to more closely match the tactile experience of painting with real paint. One of the things that's always frustrated me when painting on the iPad is that the friction from both my finger and any of the styluses I've tried isn't quite right. It can work very well for sketching, but when I open up ArtRage and start using a paint tool, there always seems to be a bit of a tactile disconnect from what I'm doing. A paintbrush that works with the touchscreen seems like the best possible solution short of pulling out real paint and using your iPad as a canvas -- which we definitely do not recommend.
Nomad capacitive brush turns your iPad into an art canvas for $24 (video)
We didn't have much luck using the oStylus as a paint brush, but even the creator confessed that it was never intended for such chores. Thankfully, the Nomad Brush was concocted specifically for those chores. What you're looking at above is a paint brush that's designed for use with capacitive screens, and it could very well spark a modern day renaissance... or something of the sort. The brush is topped with capacitive fibers that the iPhone, Galaxy Tab and iPad (among other tablets and phones) can recognize, enabling you artsy folk to express yourselves even when it's impractical to tote around a suitcase full of watercolors. Head on past the break for an (admittedly impressive) video, and pop the source link to hand over $24 in exchange for a shipping label. Just promise us you'll keep it away from any actual paint buckets, okay? Update: Looks like there's a cheaper alternative floating around from Blackbox, if you're down for it.
