Use Brushes to Create Your Masterpiece

The closest I've come to painting a canvas is the drop cloth I used the last time I painted the bathroom in my house. Steve Sprang's Brushes is just the thing for a guy like me who's more likely to paint himself into a corner than to create great works of art.

Brushes is a flexible drawing app that features three different brush styles of varying widths. With one brush, I can draw a thin dense line; with another brush, I can paint a broad transparent swath. I can vary colors, hues, shades density and other stuff that artists know more about than I do.

What I like most about Brushes is that I can paint over pictures in my camera roll. With Brushes I can draw hair on my bald head using a variety of different brush strokes. With the eye dropper, I can pick a background color and then dab over the distracting elements to make my handsome mug stand out even more. To work up close, say, to whiten my teeth, I can zoom in.

When I'm done, I can add this wonderful portrait to the other 65 similar portraits I've created and run a slide show for my family, friends and strangers on the bus to work.

Ah, who am I kidding, even with this easy-to-use drawing app, the best I can do is create neo-modernist abstracts influenced by the Dada and Op Art movements, which is a fancy way of saying "He has no clue."

But it's fun and Brushes will keep me amused for a long time. Who knows, I might even be able to actually create something worth looking at, like the wonderful pictures on Sprang's Web site.