This is a short review of two iPod Touch/iPhone application, Brushes and Colors!

This is the #2 painting I tried on my iPod Touch. It's done with the Brushes application. The colours are slightly brighter on the iPod than view on my computer.

It's "finger painted" with a selection of brushes (solid, bristle, hard). The art board can be zoomed up to 800%.

Colour is selected from a colour wheel.

After the painting is done, it can be saved into the gallery onboard or to the default Photo application. Whenever the iPod/iPhone is plugged into the Mac, the Image Capture application will pop up and ask you to download the image. Nice.

The downside is there's only one export size for it at 440 by 320 pixels.

To find out more about Brushes, just head on to brushesapp.com, there's a Flickr gallery as well.

This one's done using the Colors! application. Gosh, I need more practice.

This is the interface on Colors, which I prefer because the control tab is always on. For Brushes, you have to tap once for it to appear.

The art board can be zoomed up to 400%.

This is the colour wheel on Colors!. Choices for brushes are only soft and hard, with options for fading. One can choose the opacity as brush size.

This wheel is harder to use than Brushes' wheel because the small triangle makes selecting precise colours even more difficult.

Both applications offer undo. Yes!

Colors! also allows the painting to be exported, in 3 different sizes (440 by 320, 880 by 640 and 1280 by 1760). At the large size, I'm amazed the clarity is still there. That means one can put lots of details into the painting

At the developer's website, colors.collectingsmiles.com, you can also find user galleries where people share their paintings.

The really cool thing about Colors! is it records the brush strokes. Meaning you can watch how the illustration is speed painted! If you click on the image of the old man below, you go to the page where you can view the video.

These two applications are just fabulous!

They are the first two applications I bought from the iTunes store, for a total of $10.