drawing

Draw Something (iOS | Android) offers turn-based gameplay that brings friends together as teammates to draw basic items (and sometimes more-complex ones) to see how long they can continue to guess each others' drawings correctly.

Once you've created a game with a friend through Facebook, Twitter, or by registering within the game, you're given three choices (easy, medium, or hard) of objects to draw that your friend will need to identify. Once your friend receives the drawing, he or she is given only a handful of available letters to use for the word (probably to make it a little … Read more

It may not be a mobile version of Adobe Illustrator, but Skitch can handle basic image annotations and sketches exceptionally well. It's easy to learn, its tools work well, and it can even export your work to Evernote.

Getting started with Skitch is simple. From the Home screen, you can open up a blank canvas, import an image from your gallery, or take a new photo with your mobile device's camera. Also new to Skitch is a feature that lets you pull up and add annotations directly onto a Google Map, which is perfect for giving detailed or … Read more

I've written about several iOS apps here that add effects to your photos, but most are just for adding a retro look, tuning your images, or making a photo look hip for social networking sites. I've found some great ones like PhotoToaster, Photogene2, and SnapSeed, but there's another genre of apps that make even more drastic changes to your images.

This week's collection of iOS apps is about taking your photos to the extreme. The first turns your images into line-drawn cartoons. The second fills in your image with words to produce a thought-provoking effect. The third puts your image through a coffee grinder, and brews up a bubbly colorful mosaic.… Read more

Ever tried teaching your child how to draw an animal, but just didn't know where to start? Next time, try starting with a butt. That's right.

Everything Butt Art, a freemium iPad app, wants to teach your child how to draw, a learning process that relies on repetition and familiarity. One where every drawing starts with a butt. It may sound kind of strange, or perhaps even offensive at first, but once you begin using the app and go through the steps of each drawing, your apprehension quickly turns into admiration.

Let's take a look at how … Read more

Ever know what an image looks like, but have no idea what its file name could be?

If you have a decent drawing hand on the computer, you might be in luck. There's a site called unofficial Google Image Search by Drawing, which literally lets you draw what you're looking for. Basically, you're just drawing a picture to upload to Google Images--but without needing to create it on your computer and then upload it to Google's search engine.

Upon loading the site, you'll see an empty box (this is where you'll draw), and … Read more

The built-in Windows screen capture tool is pretty basic, and for that reason there is a plethora of programs that let users customize the way they take screenshots and what they do with the resulting images. CrossGL SnapDraw is one of the more comprehensive options we've seen. Casual users of screen capture tools will likely find the program to be a little much, but users who need options to annotate and edit their screenshots will appreciate the program's many features.

The first thing that CrossGL SnapDraw wanted us to do was configure the keyboard shortcut that we wanted … Read more

Six-Guns is a freemium sandbox cowboy game that models itself after the popular console game Red Dead Redemption. While it may not be on par graphically with the game it resembles, Six-Guns definitely still has good-looking graphics as you explore a huge world and complete quests. The control system is like in many first-person shooters on the iPhone: move your character using a control stick on the left side, and look around by swiping the screen on the right.

The game is set in both Oregon and Arizona (with a way to fast-travel between regions). As you explore, you'll … Read more

Cowboy Guns is a dual-stick shooter set in the Wild West with quests, guns you can upgrade, and a few different gameplay modes to keep you interested. Along with the dual-stick interface (standard movement on the left and firing on the right), you can switch to a different gun by tapping its icon in the middle; use thrown weapons like dynamite with a button on the right; or gain health back by tapping a first-aid icon on the left.

Adventure mode takes you through the storyline: you're a cowboy who faces a deadly gang of criminals called the Crimson … Read more

McGyro is a fun target-shooting game where you tilt your iPhone to aim at targets in an Old West setting. You play as the Sheriff McGyro, and your job is to blow away bad guys that appear as wooden targets.

The storyline is presented in comic book format between each part of the three-part missions. Each mission follows a simple formula: the introduction of a bad guy, traveling to the destination, killing the bad guy's evil henchmen, then killing the bad guy. Scoring head shots gives you extra points so it pays to be accurate, but if you don'… Read more