Levels of Creativity in iPad Art Applications

I’m just thinking it would be a good idea to have some sort of rating system for the applications I review in the book. The writing would assess their creativity quotient. So applications that you can use to be more creative with would get a higher rating. Applications like Pixelmator for iPad and Procreate would have the highest rating and applications such as any of the apps which just allow you to slap a filter on the whole of a photo would be lower or at the bottom. Applications such as Painterly would be nearer to the top because it is possible to use its facilities for tracing images in a creative way. It all depends on how you use it! You could for example choose one single effect and brush the whole of the image with that effect. Or you could do what I did, which was to bring in parts of images I had already worked on in iColorama as a collage and build up a creative piece of art work. I have the idea at the moment to use some of the grunge types of images I have and build them up into some sort of futuristic landscape. It would be easier to do that in Affinity Photo because I can turn images around to fit a perspective of a landscape. The only thing I can do with Painterly would be to use images that work already in terms of perspective.

I still think that there’s some creativity involved in those applications that just do the one thing, but do it well. If you know what the application can do and you make the creative decision to dive into the application do that one thing and get out again that’s okay. It’s better still if you can use that as a part of the larger creative process and bring images you’ve already worked on into that application to finish off. Same as if you might start in that less creative application and then move the results from it into other applications to develop further. Creativity is about having the tools making the decisions to use them and often being surprised by some serendipity and deciding to keep it.