Artomaton - The Motion Painter 4+

Unique pic to painting app - revised review

The more I use this app, the better I think that it is. It has immense potential. The most obvious area for improvement would be to increase the control over the number of brushstrokes in a painting cycle and to be able to define the size of the brushes at the start and end of painting. At the moment there is not enough control over the brush size and not enough difference between the largest and smallest brushes. Another item that would improve the app would be to allow you to click to continue the current paint cycle for longer, using a finer brush. The app automatically makes my large photomontages smaller, which limits the resolution available. I would rather pay for the ability to use a larger canvas than to buy a variety of papers which I will not use as I prefer to have the app paint onto a flat surface. Textured surfaces always degrade resolution and I never use texture on any of the PC painting programs I use as a working artist. It is a very good app and with some improvements could be an absolutely brilliant and awesome app that I would use every day.

Impressive and fast but a few more custom controls needed.

As someone who dabbles quite a lot in this sort of thing both professionally and for my own amusement, usually on a desktop using Adobe and Topaz suites of applications (also occasionally StudioArtist for animation), I find Artomaton a worthy pocket alternative, practically unrivalled especially since the demise of the CleverPainter app and running on a iPhone X Max, impressively fast. Which is not to say that there is no room for improvement.

While the GUI is attractively designed, not all of it is self-explanatory and a lot of trial-and-error tests are required to ascertain the purpose, range and inter-relatedness of some of the tools. Clear labelling would be helpful. Some instruction too, perhaps? Previews and processed images and animations are usually too small to see the effect of adjustment in some of the custom options and as it is not possible to pinch larger within the app, must be output to Photos (or to a larger monitor m) to be examined in detail. Coupled with that, the option to fine tune custom brushes and behaviours would be greatly appreciated.

That said, Artomaton is excellent value, especially compared to its desktop rivals and but for the few improvements suggested above, stops short only of being a fully featured iPhone substitute.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for the review. It was very helpful. I have been developing the drawing algorithm, but I will also consider improving its usability in the future.

most recent update :(

Thanks for trying,personally I think not even the latest update fixed the problem. The most obvious difference is especially when using the oil brushes but to be honest the update affects the all together texture of whatever style you may choose. Before these last two recent updates this app was by far THE BEST and I have tried a many. I am willing to pay again for everything in order to have the old version. Is there a way for you to re-upload it? Where can I find it? Can I download it from somewhere else?