A Cross Between Art and Video Games?

Okay, before I start, I'd like to explain that I used to be addicted to video games! I couldn't get away from them and I used to play them all day.... ALL day...

ALL day... And, it didn't used to be any video games. They pretty much all had to be made by Nintendo. As I grew up (thank God I did!), I began to get bored with Nintendo, as every kid should. I began looking at Microsoft's video games and bought an Xbox 360 two or three years ago. That lasted for about a year before I was bored with that too.

So, downstairs in my basement now sit thousands of dollars worth of video games. The video games are rarely played. In fact, it'd be a sign of the apocalypse if I sat down and actually stayed interested in one of them for more than a few hours.

So... Earlier this year, I decided to actually rediscover handheld video games since the home consoles weren't doin' it for me anymore. After a lot of hesitation, I decided to buy a black DSi...

It was mainly because they were going to start putting weekly games out that I could download from home. Let's face it, I don't really want to go to a store anymore to pick up a video game unless I've been looking at it for a while... Which, in the last year, I've looked at about two or three video games before I've bought them... And that's about how many games I've actually bought from a store in the last year.

So, after getting home with it the day I bought it, I was looking forward to some quality games that I could download... They weren't going to be free, but then again, they were never meant to be. It costs a ton to make these games!

After looking around that first day, I found one game that I used some free points to download... And, I was bored with it in about 15 minutes.

After weeks of boredom and reconsidering my purchase of the DSi, I finally came across some puzzle games that I actually wanted. Since then, I've enjoyed it and yesterday, I decided to buy some software called "Art Academy". It was some of the most expensive on the virtual store, but having played quite a bit of it, it's worth the money! (It was 8 bucks worth of points, for the record).

Essentially, it's like paint for the computer, but WAY better. WAY better.

It has some fairly nice tools for use and you have the ability to use a stylus which makes it feel as if you were making art in real life! You can zoom in, follow square guides, and when you're done, frame it! You can save it to your photo gallery and bring them to the computer if you have an SD card =)

Well, after trying out the first few lessons they provided and taking advantage of some color editing features of the DSi, I've got a few of my "drawings" and "paintings" to show =)

So.... If you want to see them, visit here:

http://letterbob.webs.com/art.html

They go from the start to my most recent. The tree and the lime have multiple images. I saved them to my DSi gallery and used color techniques to adjust the images. And, if you're really paying attention, you'll notice where I messed up. The color had been preadjusted to an odd color I didn't have...

Unfortunately, you can't undo something in paint. You can erase pencil, but undoing a step cannot be done. It just shows how much it's like real life art ;)

So... there we have it =)

~BOB~