Colors Live is a painting app developed by Jens Andersson. His development studio is named Collecting Smiles.
I’ve had a Nintendo 3DS for about a year now. So far Animal Crossing, Mario Kart 7 and Shin Megami Tensei IV have been my guilty pleasures — along with an embarrassing amount of time spent in the Mii creator, but I have spent a great portion of my playing time in the Colors Live or Colors! app, an intuitive, light, painting software with 3D features.
A note: I wrote this article in 2015 and almost 10 years later I still use it to sketch and to make a dream journal, although I haven’t been uploading new works nowadays. It’s my top 3DS app and I came to really appreciate Colors, its story, and development.
I’ll leave a selection of older sketches and video timelapses under the post.
Overview
It has layer support, a friendly interface, a few brushes to chose from… But the highlight here is the possibility to create 3D artworks in the Nintendo 3DS, thanks to the layer system, and also a very cozy, creative community created around it.
The app also shows a timelapse of your painting from scratch!
Nintendo 3DS features (back when the app was called Colors! 3D)
- 3D support — possible via its layer system,
- You draw on the bottom screen, and the top screen shows a preview of the artwork,
- A small, but nice selection of brushes (round hard edge, textured, round soft/no hardness, and an eraser. They’re shown in the image above),
- Undo, flip, brush sizes
- Timelapse recording via its “replay” feature,
- You can access, upload, watch timelapses and interact with other artists in the gallery via your N3DS,
2023 update — Colors Live for Switch
The app is called Colors Live nowadays. It maintains the same characteristics, and its new Switch version has more features:
- More brushes,
- Larger canvas size (2560×1980 pixels),
- Images and videos can be exported to your Nintendo Switch image gallery,
- Image filters and a quest system that encourages you to paint daily,
- And the previous features that are still present: Undo, eyedropper, opacity, blending, flip.
- The Colors Sonarpen, an exclusive stylus made for Colors Live.
- A quest/challenge system and filters.
Buying it
You can get it for iphones and ipads, Android, Playstation Vita, Switch, and the Nintendo 3DS.
More painting apps
Leave a Reply