find an app for my Android tablet that would help me paint. I was surprised
that I couldn't find one to help in the basic stages of blocking in a value study.
So I decided to learn how to code for Android and see what I could come up
with. Here's a sample image from the app I've made:
My app is basically a convenience, touch-enabled photo editor with aspect, pan,
zoom and lock controls. The most interesting feature, though, is that it has an
interactive gray scale display.
This mode makes it easy to flip back and forth between color and gray versions of
an image that can be panned and zoomed. The number of values and the amount of
blurring applied in converting a color image to gray scale can be adjusted to a
desired level of abstraction, similar to squinting. With a long-press gesture at
a point of interest on the screen, the value band the point lies in can be toggled back
and forth between gray and color. By pressing points on the screen, it's possible to
set some or most of the image to bands of gray and just show selected value ranges
in color. The toggle is pretty fast because the gray scale uses optimized code that
runs on a tablet's graphics processor. I'm thinking the gray scale toggle will be
helpful to channel one's focus, but I haven't tried painting from it yet.
I'm not all that far from releasing what I've got so far as an app, but it seems like
there's always another bug and more to be done!
