Create works of art with just your finger and your iPad

 The iPad has many creative uses - Brushes lets you finger paint

BRUSHES IS A GREAT APPLICATION IF YOU WANT

to use your   iPad to paint. It's so good that Jorge Colombo drew a cover For The New Yorker magazine with it on his iPhone while queuing outside Madame Tussauds. Of course, the graphic designers among you might not be able to get by purely with work created on mobile devices, but you get the point - this is one clever app, and the iPad version is great.

Brushes takes advantage of the simple skill everyone has with finger painting, gives you a blank canvas, and lets you get going. It's intuitive yet surprisingly powerful, with three brush types, support for layers and the ability to handle a multiple undos, which meansyou can go back almost any number of steps ifyou go in the wrong creative direction.

You can base your painting on any image in your photo albums and export the result back to Photos. Even more impressive is the fact that Brushes can share your masterpieces - it has its own simple web server built in, which puts up a gallery ofyour work that can be viewed from any computer on the local network. And ifyou're on a Mac, you can also take delight in revisiting the mixture of toil, inspiration and plain messing around that gave life to your paintings: just export yourwork in Brushes' own .brushes format, then play back the result, step by crucial step, using the free Brushes Viewer application for Mac OS X.

Here we showyou the basics of Brushes - including how to import a photo - and explore its colour and layer tools.




 KIT LIST:

■ iPad

■ Some pictures synced to youriPad

■ Brushes app, £2.99 from iTunes App Store

Time required: 20 mins
Difficulty: Beginner

 Use a photo

You can base any painting on a photo you have on your iPad by clicking the Photos icon.

Viewing the gallery

Tap the 'Gallery' button to see all your creations in a cool swipeable gallery Interface.

Layer control

These buttons let you manage your layers. Tap here to bring up layers, and edit their order and opacity.

Colour options

Choose your brush colour here. The plpperte icon next to it lets you copy a colour from your main photo, while the bucket icon lets you fill a large area with colour.

Brushing up

Tap this button to edit the properties of your paint brush.

1 Starting your masterpiece You can start from a blank canvas. Ifyou want it coloured, tap the colour selector in the bottom-right, pick a colour, then tap the paint bucket tool.

 2 Import a picture Alternatively, you can start with a picture and edit it. Tap the pictures icon in the top right, and select a shot from the photo albums that are stored on your iPad.

 3 Paint job Now you're ready. Choose your brush colour by tapping the colour box in the bottom-left. To copy a colour from your image, select the eye-dropper tool and drag the ring to the colour you want.

 4 Select a brush The Brushes tool lets you vary the size of the brush with a slider. You can change the brush type using the three dots. You can zoom in and out of your image by pinching.

 5 Layer it on We've painted this scary lake monster, and now want to add another picture. Tap the layers button (bottom-right), then tap'+'. Layers are useful for building up an image.

 Using opacity

 

In the colour picker, it's possible to pick a colour and give it opacity. This means that your brush strokes will be see-through, to a degree that you set using the opacity slider - the bottom slider on the left of the colour picker. 

 6 It' S an art rage We imported another photo onto another layer, and feel that our work is done. Tap 'Gallery' (top-left), then the arrow button to see the options you have for saving and sending your art.