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Crayola ColourStudio HD and iMarker let you colour in on the iPad

Who wants to do some colouring in? Modern-day kids can now recreate old-school colouring fun on the iPad, with a Crayola app and awesome iMarker digital crayon.

Richard Trenholm Former Movie and TV Senior Editor
Richard Trenholm was CNET's film and TV editor, covering the big screen, small screen and streaming. A member of the Film Critic's Circle, he's covered technology and culture from London's tech scene to Europe's refugee camps to the Sundance film festival.
Expertise Films, TV, Movies, Television, Technology
Richard Trenholm
2 min read

Who wants to do some colouring in? We all remember how much fun it is to break out the crayons, and now kids can recreate the colouring fun on the iPad, with a Crayola app and awesome iMarker digital crayon.

Download the free Crayola ColourStudio HD app and you can draw on your iPad with the iMarker, a fat, colourful marker just like the ones we ham-fistedly swirled around reams of computer paper back in the day.

This marker is a digital stylus, though, so your scribbles appear on the colouring-in pages in the app. The app can be used without the iMarker -- your finger will also do.

The pre-loaded pictures are cleverly designed so each part is a separate layer. That means you can't go outside the lines and don't turn the picture into a blobby mess. That said, how are modern ankle-biters going to learn how to stay in the lines if the app does it all for them? Kids these days -- they don't know they're born.

You can also use the library of backgrounds, music and sound effects to create your own colouring-in canvas.

The pictures are animated too, so fish bob cutely around sunken ships and monsters peek out of a bedroom until you start drawing. The full range of Crayola crayon colours and a selection of different virtual pens are available to draw with -- it's enough to give Penny Crayon a heart attack.

Griffin, the creator of the app, and Crayola are also responsible for the Crayola Trace and Draw, a tough and chunky iPad case that clips a piece of paper in front of the screen for kids to draw on. Little 'uns can trace and colour pictures with real pens, the pictures showing through the paper thanks to a special app.

Drawing on the iPad is hella fun -- just look at the right old laugh we had with the Wacom Bamboo Paper app and Stylus. If you've ever wondered what a dinosaur, or Brian Blessed, or a grizzly bear riding a shark through an explosion would look like when drawn on an iPad, now's your chance to find out.

Even Apple is finally thinking about styluses, filing a couple of patents for powered-up pokey pens. The patents concern a simple stylus for writing on your device's screen, and a 'communicating stylus', a powered pen stuffed with motion sensors and wireless communication technology. The communicating stylus would let you write on any surface, and then wirelessly zap what you've written to your iPad or iPhone.

The Crayola ColourStudio HD app is available now, and the iMarker is coming soon, for a currently undisclosed price.