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Waterlogue: Creating beautiful "watercolors" of your photographs
Since the App Store launched, one of the more busy categories has been Photo & Video apps. Many apps have provided filters to enhance or destroy our photographs, and some of those filters have tried to turn photos into what look like paintings or drawings. I say "tried" because most of those have failed to do a good job. Waterlogue (US$2.99) is a universal iOS app from Tinrocket, LLC's John Balestrieri and Robert Clair that does one thing -- transforming your photos into watercolor-like images -- very well. Waterlogue is very simple to use: just launch the app, take a photo or select one from your photo library by tapping a camera button, and then let Waterlogue work its magic. If you like what Waterlogue has done with your photo -- which will happen most of the time -- a tap on a heart icon lets you share your painting with Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr or have it printed on a 4 x 6 inch postcard by Sincerely and shipped "anywhere in the world." Your artworks can also be saved to your Photo Library, opened in another app, or emailed. As a user, you could just stop there as your results are usually fantastic, but Waterlogue lets you tweak your images. All of the tools are available in a single sliding row at the bottom of the app. First, you have your choice of a dozen slightly different painting types: Natural, Bold, Luminous, "It's Technical", Travelogue, Rainy, Illustration, Soaked, Shallow, Color Bloom, Fashionable, and Blotted. But wait, there's more! You can also select the size of brush you're using, change the image brightness, and add a border -- which for the sake of realism even has some "paint" that has run off of the side of your image and onto the border. All of the images you see in this post were taken with my iPhone camera at some point in the last two months and then run through Waterlogue to give them that soft, hand-painted look. One thing I always wanted to do but never had the talent for is to create trip journals that are illustrated with paintings. With Waterlogue able to magically create beautiful watercolors of my photos in seconds, I can see using it and a travel journal app (perhaps Trip Journal or AOL's MapQuest Travel Blogs) to capture my memories. At this point, there's nothing more that I can say about Waterlogue other than "buy it". The app is universal, requires iOS 7.0 or better, and is optimized for iPhone 5.
A poor man's Braid: Clover on Xbox Live
Click for more watercolors! We know, you can't always judge a book by its cover -- a game by its screens. But "Braid clone" was the first thing that came to mind when we saw Clover, a forthcoming Xbox Live Arcade, no, "Community Games" title. And let's face it, the Community Games channel is still the playpen for the bastard children of Xbox Live. It's like a pet shop window: you glance at it, feel an inkling of "Should I?" and then proceed on down the street to the Arcade.But a closer look at that doggie in the window, Clover, reveals a game worth considering. Developed by indie outlet Binary Tweed Ltd., Clover is, in the words of its British maker, "a plot-driven platformer in the style of classic titles such as Fantastic Dizzy that sees the player solve logical puzzles by collecting items, talking to a diverse cast of characters and exploring artistically realised environments." It follows Binary Tweed's motto -- "New games that are a bit like old games, but better" -- by injecting modern trends like autosave and the dissolution of lives and health into the game's traditional framework. Still, Clover promises to be very much about death, as the orphaned player must deal with the sudden demise of the in-game mother and the larger political themes at play. A heady romp for a mere 400 ($5) when Clover releases in Q1 2009 (that's soon!). %Gallery-42065%
The DS Life: The artwork of Will Laren
The DS Life is a weekly feature in which we scour the known world for narrative images of Nintendo's handhelds and handheld gamers. If you have a photo and a story to match it with, send both to thedslife at dsfanboy dot com.While few would describe Will Laren's art as pleasing to the eye, his style -- ungraceful strokes, watercolors, and hand-written monologues providing the piece's humorous context -- certainly grows on you. His characters rarely fit common standards of beauty, either, often depicted with unattractive expressions, their hair a messy nest of lines, their mouths contorted, lips snarling. Still, there's something that draws us to their eccentric caricatures, vulgar patter, and rap culture allusions; we can't get enough of his work.Very few of Laren's pieces have anything to do with video games, and none of them reference handheld gaming at all, but his canvases, ring-bound notepads and moleskine notebooks, sort of qualify as "portables," so that's our justification for featuring his art this week. Plus, the comics can be pretty hilarious. Flip past the break for a look.
