Drawing On The Nintendo Switch With Colors Live

this video is sponsored by squarespace today i'm doing something a little bit different i am marrying two of my biggest hobbies that is gaming and illustration we're going to be taking a look at colors live here on the switch hello my name is brad i review tech for creative professionals and this landed on my lap during the busiest weeks of my year we had the ipads that just came out last week we've got some surface devices arriving in the mail any day now there's a bunch of xp pen tablets i'm in the process of reviewing and this app just kind of falls out of nowhere so what colors live is is it's a game slash app that you can download for your nintendo switch and there is a pen in this box which is a sonar pen which i reviewed several years ago now the sonar pen is a really innovative idea it came about back in the ancient days of the ipad where all ipad styluses kind of sucked and the apple pencil only worked on the ipad pros and so they devised a way of getting some pressure sensitivity into their stylus utilizing the headphone jack now the reason their timing was bad is because one apple started rolling out apple pencils for lower end ipads but also they started phasing out headphone jacks in their phones and other phone companies followed and of course the ipads followed too so a lot of the devices that would be able to use this can't anymore so let's start by just taking a look at the stylus i should have cut the sticker before starting this i should also point out that colorslive did send me the stylus and a code for the app to use but this is not a sponsored video these these opinions will be my own all right so let's see in this bag we have the stylus itself and there appears to be a couple nibs as well now these are disk tip nibs if you're familiar with old ipad styluses and so what these styluses are designed to do is to give you that wider surface area but there are these clear disc tips so you can kind of see through them while you're drawing on your screen all right so it is nintendo switch time so let's power this on go ahead and open that up close eastward all right so let's get this pen plugged in to our switch i've never plugged anything into the headphone jack with my switch before it's up here on top all right and then it said set the volume for at least 70 so let's that looks that looks let's just to be safe let's go to 80. all right so i have yet to run this so let's go ahead and tap on sonar pen what is sodar pen it is a pressure sensitive pen and an ideal way to use colors live it's got pressure sensitivity palm rejection and a shortcut button cool i think that's just like an ad if you bought the app but don't have a pen so we have color quest that's like a gamified art thing really interested in that i want to try that out in a minute the sonar pen thing i tapped on the online gallery which is a gallery where you can submit your artwork check out other people's artwork my profile options and new painting i'm going to just go into new painting here so as i'm looking at the canvases here what i've read is you can have a canvas uh that is like 2560 pixels by 1980 pixels and with that canvas size you're gonna get 10 layers so i'm just going to go with wide screen because it's recommended my sonar pen has not been set up so let's go okay if the nib was pre-installed insert your nib okay that's that's good to go next plug in into the headphone jack we're good there set headphone volume to max next color sonar pen is detected now let's make sure it's calibrated okay paint a soft stroke here and apply very little pressure all right that's very little pressure next mucho pressure okay next i'm all set up all right try painting with pressure so if i press light all right if i press harder well i'll be look at that we got some pressure sensitivity here keep your nib clean this is probably an important one you probably want to clean your screen and your nib while you're using this and of course replacing your nib from time to time is good so here we go we are in the app so these are set up uh they kind of look like the buttons yep that's exactly it that's cool so you have your shortcut keys bring them back how do i bring them back there we go it looks like the a button brings those back okay so let's hit l and this is our brush menu and it looks like we are on the hard stroke which is good and this is more of an airbrush stroke which gives you like different amounts of paint depending on the pressure whereas this gives you like a different thickness to the line depending on your pressure that's kind of what i prefer this is the bore airbrushy thing so that's kind of cool then of course we have the eraser and this plus button which brings up uh cool a handful of things oh we got a pixel brush we got select and move tool we got a pixel eraser solid eraser classic eraser okay so there's some stuff built in here let's go back and of course this looks like it adjusts the size yeah and it gives you a little preview of the size as as we go through this and this is probably adjusting the opacity i'm going to keep my opacity high and of course our color wheel so i'm going to try to create something that looks like a pencil and this doesn't have like a default pencil tool but it looks like if i just change the opacity of my pen tool i'm going to get the same effect i want so so that's cool so let's go ahead and zoom in here what are we going to draw um it's a switch so we're going to draw mario [Music] cool cool cool so let me hit the a button uh how do i do layers look at that we got the instant replay that's cool i'm gonna do that again nice what about layers i don't see layers here so let's go back oh my gosh i think this is layers there it is add a layer that's what i needed and of course over here we have the ability to merge layers together uh you could duplicate a layer if you want to and it looks like this is an opacity slider so if you want to reduce the opacity of a layer you're good to go now i don't see anything like layer styles or any of those high-end like art app features in here but this this will get the job done so let's go back now that we have another layer i'm gonna change my brush here gonna get the opacity cranked up i think i'm gonna go in here to my mario layer and change the opacity i don't know if it'll show up on my camera but it's going to make this easier for me can i pinch and zoom i cannot but i can zoom in this way and then i could use the hand to move him over all right so let's draw mario's nose and i'll apply more pressure along the bottom all right all right pressure sensitivity is working [Music] while i'm finishing this up i would like to thank today's sponsor squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business squarespace has the tools you need to get your business off the ground including 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gonna wonder is hey i already have a switch but i don't have a drawing tablet could this replace an ipad or an android tablet or some kind of wacom type thing that i have for a computer so i think the short answer for that is no this does have pressure sensitivity uh it says it has palm rejection i didn't really the screen is so small that my palm really wasn't resting on it so the thing that i'm uh noticing the most as i draw is it's just it's it's really hard to get a smooth organic line and and i think there's a couple reasons that's happening and i think the main reason is just the texture of the screen this is a rubber tip stylus it is very rubbery and it's soft because they don't want to damage the screen and because of that it it drags there's a lot of resistance on this screen when you're dragging this across it the other question i would have is can you use this to create professional art and i mean there's an asterisk by that oftentimes if you are a good artist you can use pretty much any tool to make something cool would i recommend getting a switch over an ipad to make artwork no i would not i'd rank this experience as c it's it's not bad but i i think if you go with a traditional drawing tablet it's gonna be so much better the other thing with this app that would prevent me from saying hey get this instead of say any ipad or android app is just the level of features that are available it has the basics here you know you can change your brushes there are soft brushes and hard brushes and that sort of thing and there's erasers but that's about it you can't do a lot there same thing with the layers you can create a layer you can change the opacity of a layer but that's it there's one other thing i want to check out on this app and that's the kind of game mode that they've built into it so that game mode is called colors quest so let's go ahead and tap on that i'll just read it in color quest you paint something new every day using a theme and various rules after each day you will see the results move closer to your goal i love this there are a lot of games out there that have taken exercise and made them fun it's just really really smart that someone is doing this with drawing and illustration all right gonna tap on begin let's do this give me a quest to color far from where you live is the tower there is something you desire that is calling you it looks like this so i'm going on a quest and uh let's go ahead and start by finding our pen and i'm just gonna do like an inky thing i'm gonna just draw with ink let's go back all right for now this is my book cover we're gonna say done it's gonna save it all right so let's begin this quest cool so it gives you a mini map i'm gonna walk up here for the first challenge you have 20 minutes to paint anything you can think of that fits the theme first step good luck all right i see what they're doing this is kind of nice because it times it which means you're only going to spend 20 minutes a day or however long each challenge is go ahead and start this and i'm going to speed through it and you'll see what i draw [Music] all right simple obviously i'm not going to spend a ton of time on this just testing it out i want to see if it makes me wait a full day for the next thing or if i could just dive it i've only spent a minute and a half so let's go ahead and click done you need to paint for at least 10 minutes to complete this challenge i may have cheated a little bit and gone to the restroom instead of finished my drawing but i think 10 minutes have passed let me go ahead hit the plus button and we are done let's see what happens it's gonna save you finished today's challenge i could submit a score or i'm gonna say just for me good work a new challenge will be available tomorrow cool i like this i like that you can't speedrun it i think there's something to that i think this idea is really clever overall what do i think about colors live this is really fun i i don't think it replaces a professional drawing tablet this is definitely like a hobbyist thing if you already have maybe a desk set up and you already have a nintendo switch and you're like i would just like a sketchbook i could take with me boom i i think this kind of fills that gap the drawing experience isn't going to be as good as an ipad or a wacom tablet or something like that but it's fun it's cool it's simple it's easy i think it's just understanding where this fits in the art ecosystem this isn't going to give you like professional hardcore artwork you're not going to make a book with this or a movie with this but for drawing illustrating a little digital sketchbook you could take with you hey that's not too bad what do you think have you used this app yet let me know down below in the comments thank you all for watching and i'll talk to you in a couple of days [Music] you

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 181,427

Keywords: tech, technology, art, illustration, drawing, wacom, ipad, apple pencil, procreate, review

Id: UJdMVoMdp1Y

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021