Live Color Review (Switch / Switch eShop)
Note: A special thanks to Sasha Stowe for acting as a consultant for this review. You can find his art in Instagram and Twitter.
A few ‘apps’ have made their way to the Switch, usually just things like Youtube, Calculator, Netflix, that sort of thing, but now we have a full digital art program in the form of Live colors. Far from being a simple clone of MS Paint, it also has an ace up its sleeve in the form of the Sonar Pen, which we will talk more about in a moment. But can the Switch really provide a suitable hardware environment for such a piece of software?
Simply put, Colors Live is a fairly simple and straightforward art creation suite, and a continuation of Colors! 3D on the 3DS. You’ve got brushes, an eraser (or eraser, if you’d rather measure butter by volume), and honestly, that’s about it when it comes to usable tools in terms of actually affecting the canvas. Blending modes, polygon tools, textures, gradients – none of these are present, which means everything seems to “go back to basics.”
This simplicity initially felt like a massive limitation at first, but after a while we were surprised by how far we were able to go without them. In a way, the lack of tools forced us to have a different kind of creativity and made us think more as if we were using traditional media.
However, you are not stuck without improvements in digital quality of life altogether. There is a pleasantly robust layer system that supports 10 layers in total that can be easily switched between on the fly, the expected undo and redo buttons, zoom, opacity sliders for each individual layer, all wrapped around a resolution canvas. surprisingly generous maximum of 2560×1440 (as seen through the Switch’s 720p display, of course). You can even view the entire drawing process of your artwork in video form, allowing you to see the creative process from start to finish.
So things are looking pretty good at the moment, although one thing that is not right is the lack of a bucket tool. The inability to quickly fill an area feels like a huge gap in the already limited set of tools, and one that we realistically can’t think of a reason to skip. Admittedly, you don’t have those frills with any traditional medium, but you don’t get the other additions we mentioned above either, which makes the exclusion even more perplexing.
But to hell with digital tools, what about this? physical tool we mentioned, the Sonar Pen? Well, in short, it’s a stylus with a transparent conductive disk at its tip that allows you to have relative accuracy (and see what you’re doing) on the Switch’s touchscreen. This technology has been around for a while, but where things get really interesting is the big speaker wire that comes out of the top and connects to the headphone jack, and as a natural result of this, there is no audio at all. app, so you may want to listen to some soft jazz on another nearby device so your ears have something to do.
Using clever tricks, the Sonar Pen can use sound to measure the pressure you are putting on it and communicate it with the app appropriately. The bottom line is that the stylus is pressure sensitive, which is something most people wouldn’t expect from something on a gaming console, but it performs a lot better than we would have expected. Palm rejection is also employed, and while it worked for the most part, it is clear that, like pressure sensitivity, it is only possible thanks to an alternative solution. It’s commendable, but it doesn’t have the reliability of its pressure-based cousin, so we ended up using the tried and true floating hand technique to get through.
The main controls act as hotkeys for the various functions on offer, which can speed up your workflow extremely well. Plus, everything can be mapped for right- or left-handed users, and even completely reassigned to whatever you want. It’s a small inclusion, but one that gets top marks from an accessibility standpoint. The pen itself has a button too, but it actually feels pretty cheap and can be oddly difficult to press, which means we spend most of our time relying on the buttons on the console.
In terms of modes, you’re basically stuck with just two, one of which will surprise a lot of you for being the standard swamp painting mode. The other, called Colors Quest, offers you a series of challenges to overcome in an artistic sense. Sometimes you’ll have a limited color palette, a limited set of tools, or even just a partially created theme and image that you need to finish. It’s a nice little inclusion, but what’s puzzling is that it actively locks you out of any subsequent challenges you want to complete for a full day by completing just one. You can adjust the date on your console to avoid this, but it’s not something you need to do if you want to complete more challenges.
On a brighter note, any painting you create can be uploaded to Colors Live’s own server and gallery, allowing you to share it with the world or simply export it as an uncompressed PNG to any device with an internet browser (and the ability to download images). You can use the system’s screenshot functionality and while it’s more convenient, it will also lower the resolution of your artwork and make it crisp and riddled with JPEG artifacts, so don’t do that.
Oh, and if you try to dock it, it just runs as standard but without any meaningful way to control anything.
conclusion
All in all Colors Live is a useful art app with some weird limitations. The Sonar Pen and layers are absolutely welcome in our eyes, but the lack of a bucket tool, restricted brush styles, and plenty of other staples left us a bit wanting. Having said that, people have already been creating tremendous works of art that show that any medium is only as powerful as the skills of the artist. We would have liked to see a more comprehensive digital art package, but for someone who already owns a Switch and wants to try scribbling on a screen with more than just their finger, Colors Live provides a simple and easy entry point.
www.nintendolife.com