This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
It’s easy to think of David Scott Leibowitz, whose work fronts this week’s magazine cover, as kind of a renaissance man 2.0: the artist, app developer and author is a tireless champion of the new when it comes to visual arts.
The iPhone just became much more cost-friendly in the second largest wireless market in the world. India’s third largest carrier, Reliance Communications, has started selling the iPhone 5c and 5s with a two-year contract. Indian customers have previously only been able to purchase the iPhone for its full, unsubsidized price off contract.
India is a key emerging market for Apple, and this move could significantly bolster iPhone sales in the country if it catches on at other Indian carriers.
This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
Matthew Watkins spends a lot of time fingerpainting, but has also brought his handiwork into the real world on carpets, cars, plexiglass and the more usual prints.
He caught our eye in 2009, when his one-man show went up in an Apple reseller, the first of its kind. His early playful works seemed to dance across the iPad screen or knowingly frame scenes of daily life with his iPhone. Watkins lives in Southern Italy – by way of England and Canada – and has recently been involved in iPad art mash-ups and live fashion shows in Manchester, England and Florence, Italy. He’s also a founding board member of iAMDA (The International Association of Mobile Digital Artists).
We caught up with him to find out what apps have taken over his toolkit, why you should think big when it comes to printing and how he’ll be picking up a shovel for inspiration near Verona, Italy.
Cult of Mac: What have you been up to lately?
Matthew Watkins: 2013 was a year full of travel and fingerpainting, new technology and new collaborations.
In February, I worked on a multi-discipline project with the 154 Collective. I was invited to participate on their two Manchester dates at the Lowry theatre. It consisted of an exhibition, theatrical production (for which we provided collaborative finger painted animations) and concert with live collaborative projected fingerpainting featuring Fabric Lenny, Benjamin Rabe and myself…
March was my biggest show so far. I was given a one-man exhibition at the Verona Natural Science Museum called “Uncontainable Art.”
The show was coordinated by the University of Verona in concurrence with the yearly science event “Infinitamente” (Infinitely) which showcases a new artist every year…It figured four works about three meters high and about 40 medium 50x70cm pieces.
I kicked it off with two days of workshops. It was great to be in such an old institution in an old city. The show ran through June and counted about 15,000 visitors.
CoM: These robotic fossils are a new thing for you. How did that get started?
MW: I was shown the museums collection of fossils from Bolca. It’s the largest collection in the world. Bolca is a very small area about the size of a fair sized pub. A geological fluke of nature with stacked a motherlode of perfectly preserved fossils with unprecedented biodiversity.
Fish fossils have inspired me since I was a child, but this was over the top. I worked on my robotic fish fossils for a couple of months. First I started with robotic fish, then I inserted common everyday elements, including a broken iPhone 3g. Imagining a distant fossilized robotic future juxtaposed with our culture. Maybe 50 to 100 million years from now.
Then a funny thing happened. I got a phone call from the head of the fossil collection at the museum. I went back to Verona and we chatted for two hours about fossils and art. He explained all about the strange origin of the Bolca fossils, and I explained what I was thinking. T
The deeper we got into it the more it seemed like a scientific/artistic collaboration. I had just made stuff up. He told me under what conditions things fossilize and how they might be preserved. For example, a jellyfish is 99% water, but in the right conditions it will fossilize and even retain some of its color.
So I am invited back in November to participate in some digs. I will dig for fossils and inspiration. I hope to be given some samples of Bolca rock from which to make to make my own real, robotic, fossils.
CoM: What else are you currently working on?
MW: Other than the fossils I am painting imaginary cities. I am fascinated by urban decay and architectural artifacts.
CoM: What new tools or apps are you using?
MW: My favorite painting app is by far Procreate by Savage Interactive. It has a perfect painting engine, amazing brushes, awesome resolution and as of recently video playback. Almost all of my recent work is done on it.
Sketchbook Pro is a great app. Paper53 is also a fun app.
Brushes 3 and 4 are no longer supported, but the developer Steve Sprang has made his delightful vector app InkPad open source. This should be interesting. It’s like Illustrator for your iPad. I have used it for a number of logo designs.
One of the coolest apps is Tagtool for doing live shows. It allows you to create looping moving art on multiple layers. You can connect multiple iPads in a session for collaborative work. It’s one of the more expensive apps, but well worth the money. Looking forward to getting my hands on the iPad Air. Sounds perfect for tagtooling.
There are also some fun designing apps like Phoster and Over. You can comp quick fun designs from your art. Sometimes very convincing.
Stylii have improved since we last talked. There are a number of options for a pressure sensitive stylus. I use the Pogo connect. But mostly I just use my finger.
CoM: Any advice for artists looking to get their works off the iPad and into the real world – about printing, finding sponsors, opportunities?
MW: When you create virtual art how you output it becomes very important. I would think beyond letter size glycee prints. Experiment. There are no limitations. Paper, plastics, I have had great results with plexiglass. I have been commissioned to do a glass door, I am looking forward to that.
You should get your work out there, online, social media…make connections. Don’t be timid. People will notice you. Participate in competitions. But mostly, to paraphrase the great cyclist Eddy Merckx, “Paint lots.”
CoM: What are some ways that newbies can become a part of the online community?
MW: Don’t be shy and start uploading. All social media channels are open.
It seems a lot of the community has moved from Flickr to Facebook. It’s a big tribe now with lots of great art and lots of people getting their fingers dirty, so to speak, for the first time.
They are a very sharing lot and you can’t go wrong.
CoM: What mobile art shows or conferences will you be attending in the next six months or so?
MW: The curators at the museum would like to see me set up a show with my work hang side by side with some original fossils from Bolca. I think the result would be intriguing. I think it would make a great story. I am hoping for international interest in this show as the Museum has given me permission to ship the fossils.
I am participating in a show in Phoenix with some of my original core group of fingerpainting friends. That will be nice. The show is to start February 2014 and run for a year.
I am also talking about going back to Bosnia and Herzegovina for another show. I had a great reception last time. I would really like to do workshops and some live painting shows this time.
You can check out more of his work on Flickr or his website.
This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
Roz Hall is a UK-based artist who employs his iPad as a canvas to create some stunning portraits.
Hall wasn’t always a painter with pixels: he studied Fine Art at the Winchester School of art and is currently at work on a Master’s of Fine Art at the University of Chichester.
He’s worked as a filmmaker and in video production, but his main love since 2010 has been painting, at first on the iPhone, and now on the iPad.
This father, student and self-described beard enthusiast told Cult of Mac about his artwork, the perks of tablet painting and why naked Apple devices are best.
Cult of Mac: What apps do you use, and why? Any apps you started using but don’t anymore? What’s the evolution of your process?
Roz Hall: My two favorite apps are Procreate and Inkpad, and I use them both for two very different things. Procreate is great for recreating that paint or ink feel as it has some wonderful brushes, which are completely customizable if you wish. Inkpad is a vector app, like a stripped down version of Illustrator, but very intuitive to use and awesome if you want to print off something really large! I used to use Sketchbook Pro as it’s a very advanced app and lovely to use, but I feel like the brushes are a little small and I like to start out with a large brush to block in shapes. I prefer to stick to a single brush type for each painting and just adjust the size and opacity, this probably comes from my background as a traditional artist.
CoM: What device do you use? Why? Any covers, cases, or peripherals you prefer?
RH: I started painting on my iPhone 3G but upgraded to the iPad and am now on the 3rd Generation iPad. The screen size is perfect, small enough to paint with on the train without drawing too much attention, and large enough to not feel restricted. I mainly just use my finger but have used a few different styluses.
My current favourite is the Sensu Brush, which has a small rubber tip on one side and an actual brush on the other. I was genuinely surprised at how natural that would feel, as I’d thought it sounded like a gimmick. I have played with a couple that offer pressure sensitivity but couldn’t get on with them, although the new JOT Touch looks promising. I like to have my Apple gear fairly naked as it feels criminal to cover them up, so I just have my iPad in its Smart Cover.
CoM: How do you sell you art work? What are the unique challenges of creating commercially viable artwork on a digital device? The unique rewards?
RH: I have sold a few postcards on Zazzle and have painted a couple of commissions, but apart from that I don’t see it as a hugely commercial venture. I won’t be quitting my day job quite yet. Companies have send hardware to me to use and blog about, including tablets, which is a huge perk.
I was recently flown to New York to attend the launch of the Microsoft Surface 2 and to demonstrate to the press. So if you’re reading this, Apple, I’m available! The art community is getting less suspicious of digital art with artists such as Tracey Emin and David Hockney producing work on the iPad, which is making it easier to get work into serious galleries.
CoM: How do you exhibit your work?
RH: I am fortunate enough to have had work exhibited across the globe but the format changes depending on the gallery requirements. Some like to have your work printed and framed traditionally, where as others like to project or display using LCD screens. The Saatchi Gallery in London exhibited some of my portraits on a large LCD screen but had it in landscape mode, which didn’t look good at all. I have just started to get pieces printed onto perspex glass, it looks gorgeous as the colors are really strong and the glossy look mimics that of the iPad screen.
CoM: What kind of community to you belong to or facilitate for digital artists? Is there an “I make art on an iPad” group you hang out with?
RH: When I started out painting on the iPhone, I got myself a Flickr account and posted them up there. The reaction was incredible and immediate!
That’s what I love about creating work digitally. I have oil paintings which have been seen by maybe five or six people and now just sit in my attic, but when I paint on the iPad, I post up to Flickr and can get 500-600 views in a day. Flickr has a strong community of mobile digital artists, who mainly share their work in groups dedicated to different hardware and apps.
Good ones to check out are iAMDA (The International Association of Mobile Digital Artists), iPad Creative, iPad Art and Fingerpainted. Facebook has iPad Artists and iPad painters Groups, which are great places to share tips and comment on each others work.
CoM: Any advice for artists looking to work on the iPad or other devices? Would you recommend it to new artists?
RH: Painting is a hobby of mine. I have a full-time job, a growing family and I’m studying part time, so if I get an opportunity to paint, I have to be quick. Using the iPad means that I can paint wherever I am and whenever I have a free few minutes. You don’t need to have a room set up with canvases and an easel permanently taking up space. It’s inexpensive too, after the initial hit of the hardware itself, you can realistically paint for as long as you like without having to order in new paint…
You can check out more of Roz’s work at his website.
Getting your website online – and keeping it there – shouldn’t be something you should have to think about once you’ve picked a host. Yet there are circumstances where you have no choice but to think about that. There are a ton of hosting options out there, but one of the most popular is DreamHost because of their reliability, service, and price.
And through this Cult of Mac Deals offer you can get 1 year of DreamHost web hosting plus 2 free domains for 85% off – just $19. That’s one killer deal!
It was pretty clear from the beginning that the iPad was going to be great for drawing. Writing in cursive on a capacitive screen is still an exercise in frustration, but for drawing and painting the iPad is a legitimate new medium, like oils, charcoal or gouache. It even brings something genuinely new to the game: light. Unlike all other painting methods (except perhaps matte painting for the movies), the iPad’s paintings actually glow.
There are many, many painting and drawing apps in the App Store, so here I’ll write about my favorites.
Procreate is the app I use when I paint on my iPad. When I went to a life-drawing class a couple months back in Berlin, I took my iPad mini and my finger along. After getting over the disappointment of a last-minute switch from a female model to an (admittedly hot) male model, and also convincing said model that I wasn’t pointing my iPad’s camera at him, I got some pretty good results.
Procreate distinguishes itself by being easy to use yet powerful. After a brief learning curve, where you discover some of the “hidden” controls (the layers panel was something of a dark art in earlier versions), it all but disappears. The brush size and opacity controls are persistent at the screen edge, and you can long-press to bring up a color picker. Pro tip for all painting apps that have this feature: Paint a few swatches of your colors into the corner and you can quickly sample them with a ling press. This is a lot like having a palette of paints when painting in oils.
Procreate also lets you import images from the camera roll or Dropbox, to use various pressure-sensitive styluses, and to record your paintings so you can play back the creation process step-by-step.
But what really makes it my go-to app is that it’s so easy to use. Head to the settings and you can see a section explaining all the gestures available. Undo/redo, clear layer, zoom; plus a whole lot of gestures to use when doing things like managing layers. This means that you never really have to stop painting and think about the interface. Kind of like a real canvas and paint.
Brushes was one of the first drawing apps for the iPhone, and then the iPad, and it’s still one of the best. Brushes first distinguished itself by great brush feel, and it still has that. The basics of the app are similar to any other painting app, but Brushes has, well, great brushes. The textures are excellent, and the responsiveness is top-notch, and it really is an app you can lose yourself in for hours, painting away and zooming onto the details over and over. I lost many hours to the app when I first loaded it onto an iPad, although these days I prefer Procreate, as the brushes are more plentiful and, well, now I’m just plain used to Procreate, which counts for a lot.
Still, Brushes remains the only app that, as far as I know, was used to paint a New Yorker magazine cover.
All of these painting apps are bitmap apps. That is, a 1000×1000-pixel canvas has 1,000,000 pixels. And if you zoom in past a 1:1 view, those pixels will get blocky or blurry.
If you use a vector app like Inkpad or iDraw, then your strokes are described in terms of length and direction. If you sketch a straight line that is 200 pixels long and 20 pixels wide and runs at 40 degrees from the horizontal, it can be described mathematically. And when you blow the picture up to the size of the building, those same lines and shapes can be mathematically expanded too, redrawn at the new size with no pixel artifacts. This also means that file sizes are usually much smaller, as they don’t need to record every pixel’s color.
My favorite of the two is Inkpad, and it’s also the only one of the pair that has been updated for iOS 7 (iDraw’s last update was way back in February 2013). Inkpad is from Taptrix, the folks behind seminal iPad painting app Brushes (more on that in a sec).
The best thing about Inkpad is that you don’t need to know anything about vectors to use it. Anyone who has had to learn Adobe Illustrator will know how frustrating vector apps can be. Inkpad on the other hand is as intuitive as a bitmap painting app. You can paint strokes onto the canvas, and then, because they’re vectors, you can grab the little Bezier handles and adjust the length, the shape and son on. Everything you’ll need is there, including text tools, layers, blend modes, and tools for arranging all the elements by depth.
You can also import photos (although clearly you can’t do any vector voodoo on them).
But the best part of Inkpad is like the best part of Procreate: ease of use. Somehow the app seems to just know when you want to select a whole shape with a tap, or to just drag one corner of a line over a few pixels. The toolbar can be dragged anywhere, and it runs like a flash (although not like Flash, thank God) even on an underpowered iPad mini, and you can even use the camera to grab quick snaps for reference purposes.
Here’s a radical idea: what about using a pen and paper to draw, and then somehow adding that to your iPad for editing? That’s the idea behind Inkflow. Or rather, that’s one small feature of Inkflow, a note-taking app for the iPad.
Inkflow is a drawing app in its own right, although it’s really aimed more at sketching and handwriting than at full-on painting. There are several brushes, plus colors, zoom and editing features, and even a text tool. But it’s the vector import which makes the app really special.
Draw your pictures or diagrams on paper, using color if you like, and then use the “Inkport” feature to import your sketch using the iPad’s camera. It is converted into Inkflow’s vector format on import, and you can then select and resize the picture as you like. You can’t edit and adjust the lines like you could in an actual vector app, but it’s a pretty great way to mix paper and pixels.
It’s also free, although you’ll have to pay to get brushes, colors and Inkport.
Tayasui Sketches is a minimal sketching app, although that doesn’t mean that it’s missing features. Rather, it offers the usual set of tools, only it does it in a very unobtrusive manner.
The tools are standard – pens, pencils, brushes – but in the same way that Penultimate offered the best iPad ink for a long time, so Sketches has a fantastic painting engine. The airbrush is especially good.
The IAP adds a color-picker tool (long press to bring up the loupe), more brushes and brush controls (wet vs. dry, different tip sizes). Whatever the paid status of your copy, you can export pictures by flicking them into an envelope (it’s pretty cute) and zoom/undo/redo/move with pinches and swipes.
Like many of these apps, Tayasui Sketches is free, and the extras come in the form if an in-app purchase. Many people moan about this, and I would prefer it if I didn’t have to restore my damn purchases every time I reinstall it, but IAPs are the modern equivalent of demo periods, so we should just quit our whining already.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This week, our picks include one that tells you when famous people die; a DVR for your commute; and pretty, pretty weather forecasts.
Here you go:
R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App – News – $0.99
It’s the witching season and there’s a weird little app to keep you informed while you’re eating tiny versions of regular candy and watching horror movies of varying quality.
R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App is as basic as its title is punctuated: It’s a news feed that updates every time a person of note passes away. So if you want to be the first among your friends to say, “Oh, no, that guy died?,” it has you covered. It’ll even send you notifications and you can instantly share any of the eulogies of Sausage Kings or 1960s character actors on social media and in text messages, if that’s your thing.
It all sounds pretty tacky, but it’s actually a pretty good resource for learning about interesting people that you can never, ever meet now. For example, did you know that recently deceased Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer, who produced Star Trek: The Animated Series and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, also provided the voice for Tracy the Gorilla in the unfortunate knock-off Ghostbusters cartoon?
Well, you do now.
R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App
Nice Weather 2 – Weather – Free
I appreciate a simple, uncluttered interface and that’s why I hate the Weather Channel app. But I’ve replaced that table-laden monstrosity with Nice Weather 2. It’s a jumble-free program that has all the information you need that still manages to look neat and clean. The curved line at the bottom represents the temperature over time, and you can drag that little ball along it to get actual numbers. You can also check humidity and the wind’s speed and direction, and the high and low temperatures are marked for your convenience.
Beyond that, it’s just striking to look at. And I know I’m talking about the weather here; that’s how good-looking this thing is.
My Mountain of Debt — Finance — $0.99 (50%-off launch sale price)
My Mountain of Debt, a new financial app by developer Fun with Data, believes that paying off your debt is as hard as removing a giant pile of bricks from over the opening to your anthill. At the start, you enter your total debt in up to four categories, and then adjust the amounts as needed.
Each time your debt shrinks, the formic hero mounts the pile with his trusty pickaxe and whittles down the stack. It could be a valuable tool to keep your debt in perspective and show your progress — plus that ant looks pretty cute in his little miner’s helmet.
Save Drives — Navigation — Free
You can prepare all you want, but accidents happen. When they do, Save Drives thinks that you should have documentation. It’s an app that turns your phone into a dashboard camera to log your drives. It maps your courses, tracks your distances driven, and records the last 30 minutes of your drive. You can cut the video into 10 or 30-second chunks as needed, which could come in handy if you need to present something in court or if something crazy happens in front of your car that you want to show your friends later.
If you are in an accident, it’ll even send out some e-mails or post something on Twitter to let people know, which is simultaneously handy and random. It’s handom.
Maps© — Social Networking — Free
If you want to use Google’s Street View function without having to go into Apple’s occasionally dodgy Maps, you might want to check out Maps©. In addition to letting you look at people’s lawns like you’re there, you can also drop pins between two points to calculate distance (this gets less accurate the farther apart your points are), check traffic, and get directions. And if you want to see where your friends live (which is creepy, but I’m sure you might have innocent reasons), you can import their addresses from your contacts and drop pins there.
It does a bit of everything, really.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has compiled this list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.
Enjoy!
With a penchant for theatrical indie anthems, Montreal’s Arcade Fire has amassed a broad international following without compromising its restless artistic vision.
For the follow-up to 2010’s Grammy-winning releases “The Suburbs,” the band has enlisted the production skills of LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy. At more than seven minutes long, the title track’s hypnotic, futuristic disco groove demonstrates some sparkling chemistry, making a bold statement to Arcade Fire’s fourth studio album.
Clocking in at over 1 hour and 15 minutes in length, “Reflektor” is one of the band’s most interesting journeys as the group reflects on issues of morality, community, anti-capitalism and much more while still providing tunes that will get your body moving.
After her second EP “Ghost” was released in 2012, Sky Ferreira quickly became one of the most promising artists to watch. Her single “Everything Is Embarrassing,” was well received but we’ve been waiting to see how those skills will translate into a full-length album for the 21-year-old pop artist and “Night Time, My Time” is the answer.
The debut full-length release was produced by Ariel Rechtshaid and Justin Raisen, and features steep hooks, expansive beats, along side a glitchy rave-girl esthetic. Tracks such as I Blame Myself, Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay), 24 Hours and of course the title track will cause you to listen compulsively listen as Sky dishes out her frustrations and uncertainties in search of her sound and potential.
Michael Silver has explored several different sounds via a series of EPs since since releasing his first album four years ago, but with the release of “Outside,” Silver has chosen to focus on his impressions of travel, motion, stability, and exploration, and the results are just as conceptual as those EPs, musically it’s another shift.
Often, the album feels like the flipside of the still-hip ’80s sounds he played with on his debut: “Outside” overflows with breathy synth pads, new age-y pan flutes, and approximations of exotic instruments that often read as cheesy to listeners decades later. Coupled with his soothing vocals, these songs are reminiscent of hypnagogic pop. Silver’s reproductions of this glassy ’80s sound are extremely faithful — “Strange Form of Life” could have soundtracked an episode of Miami Vice. The way “Beyond Light”‘s smoothly pulsating beat and melody gradually build in speed like a train pulling away from the station makes it a highlight, while “The Crossing” and “Jump Out of the Train” bring some passion to the proceedings.
by Robert Hilburn
As music critic for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Hilburn knew Cash well throughout his life: he was the only music journalist at the legendary Folsom Prison concert in 1968, and he interviewed Cash and his wife June Carter for the final time just months before their deaths in 2003.
In “Johnny Cash: The Life,” Hilburn conveys the unvarnished truth about a musical icon whose colorful career stretched from his days at Sun Records with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to the remarkable creative last hurrah, at age sixty-nine, that resulted in the brave, moving “Hurt” video. Hilburn’s rich reporting shows the remarkable highs and deep lows that followed and haunted Cash in equal measure. A man of great faith and humbling addiction, Cash aimed for more than another hit on the jukebox; he wanted to use his music to lift people’s spirits and help promote what he felt was the best of the American spirit.
Drawing upon his personal experience with Cash and a trove of never-before-seen material from the singer’s inner circle, Hilburn creates a compelling, deeply human portrait of one of the most iconic figures in modern popular culture – not only a towering figure in country music, but also a seminal influence in rock, whose personal life was far more troubled, and whose musical and lyrical artistry much more profound, than even his most devoted fans ever realized.
“Hyperbole and a Half”
by Allie Brosh
If you’ve never heard of Allie Brosh you will definitely want to check out her popular blog, Hyperbole And A Half which has been condensed into book format for release this week. The 28 year-old comic utilizes MS Paint-style doodles to tell stories about everyday things like cake, poor spelling, dopey dogs and becoming an adult.
The book features a mix of new and old material where Brosh unleashes her absurdist take on the world by using very elementary but effective illustrations to bring home the point in a simple but powerful way. Brosh’s work is both funny and dark, yet incredibly touching as she drops some of the most insightful meditations ever on topics like depression, childhood, and sneaky scary spiders.
by J.J. Abrams Doug Dorst
The mult-talented J.J. Abrams – director of the Star Trek movies and upcoming Star Wars sequels – collaborated with author Doug Dorst on S. a spectacularly inventive book that’s perfect for reading on an iPad. Reading S. is an exciting adventure that slowly draws you into two parallel stories. For starters, there’s an intriguing novel, Ship of Theseus, written by the fictional author and revolutionary V.M. Straka. Scribbled with multi-colored ink along the margins of this book, there’s also fervent correspondence between a college student named Jennifer and a disgruntled scholar named Eric.
As these two strangers pass the book back and forth, they delve deeper and deeper into the mystery shrouding Straka’s life and death – and into the secrets, dilemmas, and dreams shadowing their lives. Also tucked into the book’s pages are various letters and documents which the reader can tap or click to rifle through and swipe or drag aside, making for one of the most unique reading experiences we’ve seen on the iPad yet.
Looking for something a little more indie and informative this week? Try this endearing documentary about two elderly artists living in New York. “Cutie and the Boxer” offers an intense look into the sometimes volatile balance between Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko Shinohara as their two combative peronsalities clash in the pursuit of art.
In 1972, Ushio was a 40-year-old artist who had been living in New York City for three years and had won a small but distinguished following for what he called his “boxing paintings,” created by dipping gloves in paint and literally pounding the canvas. Ushio met Noriko Shinohara, a 19-year-old art student who had just arrived in the United States; the two fell into a relationship that was destined to become permanent when Noriko became pregnant a few months later. Four decades on, Ushio and Noriko are still together, but their relationship is not always a healthy one; he’s an alcoholic who dominates the marriage and is clearly resentful that his career in art has not been more successful, especially since Noriko has caught the attention of critics with her own work, which uses comic-style images to express messages of female empowerment inspired by her own life.
Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds headline this family action-adventure as two cops dispatched from the “Rest In Peace Department (RIPD)” with the sole mission to serve and protect the living from the evil destructive spirits that hangout everyday among unsuspecting not-dead humans on Earth.
It’s basically like MIB — only Jeff Bridges is a funnier, more brash version of K, while Ryan Reynolds does his best to fill the shoes as the young, funny, motivated-but-totally-dead-and-bummed-out agent who keeps The Dude from getting to crazy.
The two eventually uncover a plot that could end life as we know it, so the two partners have to turn to each other with begrudging respect and work as a team to restore order to the cosmic balance – ya know, just like MIB, Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour and every other superhero-buddy-cop movie, making it a sure bet for decent entertainment this weekend if you just need something, anything.
iTunes – $14.99
Halloween might be over but that doesn’t mean we have to wait another 11 months before busting out the zombie movies again. iTunes has an extended cut version of World War Z on offer, which means we get even more scenes of the always-lustworthy Brad Pitt destroying zombie hordes.
The suspense is killer in this fast-paced epic of the potential last days of the human race based on the popular novel by Max Brooks. Former United Nations employee Gerry Lane is called upon to help stop the chaotic zombie pandemic that has destroyed populations around the world. Lane fights to keep his family safe, while searching for an answer to the outbreak before it destroys all of civilization- perfect for some mindless late-night entertainment.
When we were kids, my brothers and I drew all the time. We drew monsters, cartoon people, and faces. Tons of faces: goofy ones, serious ones, ugly ones, and beautiful ones.
We were fanatics. We thought we had talent. We’d take anyone aside every artist we met and beg them for tips and tricks any chance we got. Our granddad, an artist by profession, was our greatest source of inspiration. Our parents proudly hung every scribble on the walls.
I wanted to go to art school, but was persuaded to go to university instead. Academia instead of art. In college, I roomed with a gal who did charcoal figure studies. Our shitty apartment in Brighton, Sussex, was covered with the black dust as she churned out image after image of human figures in various states of undress. I, of course, recalled my artsy leanings from my youth, and headed to the art store to buy pastels, charcoal sticks and reams of thick, heavy, expensive paper.
I spent tons of money that I should have used to pay rent to buy watercolor paints, brushes and paper. I found a cheap easel for sale on a student bulletin board and spent many afternoons up on the roof, smoking hash, painting sheets of rain marching slowly over the South Downs.
Then I grew up. I got a job, a wife, kids. Painting? Drawing? Who has time for that anymore? Who has the money to do it, right? The space to store all the material needed to pursue such a dream, let alone the room to actually engage in artistic endeavors.
Luckily, I have an iPad. And judging by the amazing artwork out there, and indeed in this very issue, I might very well have all I need to rekindle my early love of artistic expression.
There are apps for painting, drawing, illustrating, photo re-touching, and the like. Tons of them in every category. There are styluses and capacitive brushes that rival the analog materials you’d end up paying a fortune for in an art store, and these can be used in the comfort of your very own touchscreen.
No wonder why Roz Hall,
Honestly, why didn’t I think of this before? Who needs a room full of dusty, messy crap to just produce more work that end up in the basement? Not me – I’ve got an iPad and a few inexpensive apps.
Here I come, art world…
We knew this day has been coming for quite sometime now, but alas, the days of an ad-free Instagram are long gone.
The first official brand-sponsored ad was published to Instagram this morning courtesy of fashion brand Michael Kors. The ad features a Michael Kors gold watch surrounded by cakes and other trinkets with the title “Pampered in Paris,” making the fashion company the first to paid advertiser on the platform
[Editor’s note: This review has been stickied to the top of Cult of Mac. Scroll down for more news.]
Let’s face it, we’ve been waiting for Apple to make drastic changes to the iPad since it released the third-generation device in early 2012. While it did introduce a high-resolution Retina display with that model, and it has made nice improvements in speed and other areas since then, we’ve all been clamoring for improvements to its design.
We’ve got those with the iPad Air — and a whole lot more. The new slate looks just like a larger version of the iPad mini. It maintains its 9.7-inch Retina display, but it has narrower bezels, a substantially thinner design — it is now just as thin as the iPad mini at 7.5mm — and it’s 28% lighter than its predecessor at just one pound.
In addition to that, we get Apple’s incredible 64-bit A7 processor that promises up to two times the power and graphics performance of the A6X, the new M7 motion coprocessor that made its debut in the iPhone 5s last month, and two W-Fi antennas with MIMO technology. And all of this will cost you just $100 more than the iPad 2.
Rather than cruising the streets for candy, the guys at iFixit spent All Hallow’s Eve tearing down the new iPad Air with all the tender loving care we’ve come to appreciate from the fixit gurus.
iFixit found few surprises during their teardown, but did discover that the APL5698 A7 processor Apple packed away in the iPad Air is a slightly different from the APL0698 version of the A7 found in the iPhone 5s, though it’s not clear what customizations Apple added to the chip.
The iPad Air comes with a gigantic battery that iFixit says is the one of the most difficult they’ve tried to remove, and the other components are much easier to swap out. As with most Apple devices, iFixit found that the iPad Air is horrifically hard to repair and gave it a repairability score of 2 out of 10.
Here are some of the internal goodies iFixit found in the iPad Air:
We’re all carrying sketchpads now, thanks to the great touchscreens on our iPads and iPhones. If toting an iPhone us all into potential artists, it turned a venerable pop artist into the world’s best-known iPad artist pretty much by accident.
David Hockney’s iPad made it into his artistic toolkit in 2010 because it happened to fit into the specially made pocket he has sewn into all his jackets – for sketchbooks.
The venerable pop artist has been using Apple devices to send daily sketches to friends since 2009. Some of those sketches are now living large in paper format at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in the aptly titled “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition” until January 2014.
Sumit Vishwakarma is an iPad art advocate whose use been creating works of art on the iPad with a variety of different apps and styluses. His work has been featured at the first Mobile Art Festival in Los Angeles, the Apple flagship store in San Francisco and the Mobile Creativity & Innovation Symposium.
After teaching various workshops on how to embrace iPad art, Vishwakarma decided to open his own art academy in San Francisco with a goal to educate people of all ages on how to create simple digital techniques based on the traditional painting techniques artists have fine tuned for centuries.
We talked to Vishwakarma about how the digital art world is maturing, what it takes to become a successful iPad artist, as well as how he’s giving kids a serious introduction to art through their favorite toy, the iPad.
Cult of Mac: What apps do you use the most to create and teach art?
Sumit Vishwakarma: Apart from ArtRage, Procreate and SketchBook Pro, I am also using “Paper” and, for animation, I use “Doink” and “iStopMotion.” Our education director Caroline Mustard is an expert in Paper.
CoM: What are the keys to becoming a successful iPad artist?
Sumit Vishwakarma: Success is subjective. I feel, if you can create an iPad painting and you like it, it’s the first “pass.” When others like it – it’s a success! Some of us don’t even know if we are artistic. I often hear: “I am not good at art,” however, this assessment is often made in relation to producing work that is judged in terms of accuracy of representation. With iPads or smartphones you can draw whenever inspiration hits.
Good art is good art, whether done on an iPad, wall or canvas. So we concentrate on empowering students to use their painting apps efficiently so they can produce what they want to create.
Cult of Mac: How does your school work? Do you visit museums, schools, and teach kids there?
SV: Our academy offers three ways of teaching iPad Art:
Workshops: We are invited by schools, libraries, city parks and recreations and local art institutes where we conduct day-long workshops. Here we walk them through various art apps and techniques. The goal is to get them started with iPad art.
Classes: Our classes are mostly electives and after school classes. Students are given a wide variety of projects to encourage and inspire their imaginations, including traditional drawing techniques, plein air sketching, animation and even abstract art depending on the student’s individual creative choices. At the end, each student walks away with a portfolio of digital art which they can display and share digitally or in printed format.
Online Classes: Many people who are interested in creating art on tablets are too busy to attend physical classes or they live too far away. Because our medium is digital, we offer our iPad art online class which consists of 10-HD video lessons covering the major art apps and techniques. These are starting to get popular because they can be taken anytime, anywhere — via laptop, tablet or smart phone! There’s a class preview here: https://www.mobileartacademy.
Cult of Mac: Do kids work on their own iPads?
SV: Most schools where we are invited to teach have some kind of iPad pilot program where students have access to an iPad for a pre-defined time. In our elective classes and after school most students bring their own iPads. For workshops, we ask students to bring their own iPads.
CoM: Who are you teaching mostly?
SV: Our goal is to empower users from toddlers to seniors, artists to scientists and everyone in between. But our most popular iPad classes are those for middle-school aged children who have an immediate grasp of the technology and start creating fast. We have even taught kindergarten kids to use Paper 53 and they do great.
We even have a class of moms who bring their iPads and learn what they can do with them. And we have elderly students, including those who are retired and want to learn to paint. The best part about iPad Art is anyone who has some interest in art can create. Different apps have different uses and thus different sets of users. Some just want to draw while some wants to create professional paintings and illustrations.
CoM: Is it a challenge to get those parents to take iPad art seriously?
SV: Yes, as you know parents want to limit “screen time” for their kids. They are using the iPad everywhere: in homes, schools, restaurants to watch videos, play games and for social media. All these represent consumption of the iPad, but I feel it can be used innovatively to explore creativity. Once parents see the value of learning to create with the iPad instead of just play video games they get behind the concept fast.
With our demo and workshop we show parents that the iPad can enable students to create and share digital content and media focusing on art and cross-curricular learning. Students can explore drawing and painting, digital photography, digital storytelling, animation and graphic design. When using iPads, mistakes can be erased and experiments are easily undertaken. This boosts their confidence and enhances creativity!
CoM: How well is the “iPad art scene” maturing? What new trends are you seeing?
SV: Mobile art is becoming increasingly common. From one art app in 2010 to now about 100+ art apps in the Appstore tells us there is incredible growth in this segment. Growth of FaceBook and Flickr groups of iPad/mobile artists has more than quadrupled as compared to last year. A giant exhibit of David Hockney’s at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum highlights the influential artist’s foray into iPhone and iPad art.
CoM: What printing techniques do you use to bring iPad art to the real world?
SV: Apart from teaching iPad art, the Mobile Art Academy also conducts Mobile art exhibitions. We recently did our first Mobile Digital Art Exhibition at the Pacific Art League displaying top 50 selected artworks from all over the world. We used two types of print media: metal (aluminium) prints and acid-free paper prints – the results are outstanding!
There are misapprehensions that iPad- created artwork does not have high resolution. But there are apps and tools that can bump up the resolution and you can produce high-quality large professional prints. If you see what has been done with David Hockney’s iPad art your fears are quickly handled – his paintings are produced on 10-foot canvases!
CoM: Do many of the kids end up selling their prints?
SV: Well, during our exhibition we sold quite good number of iPad paintings. Most of our students create work for their own use. Some of our students have even published story books using their own iPad artwork (they write and illustrate their own books under our guidance). There are a huge number of growing iPad artists around the world and some of them are selling their work professionally.
CoM: Why bring this stuff into the real world?
SV: Technology is advancing at an incredible pace. Kids have more technology in their classrooms (and in many cases, in their backpacks) than existed in the workplaces of their parents 20 years ago. Teachers can help students become 21st-century problem solvers by introducing them to a broad range of thinking and creative tools – the iPad is one of them.
The iPad can enhance confidence in creating art as students have the freedom to change every aspect of their art elements without fear – anything can be replaced, modified or manipulated. This increase in confidence and willingness to try new things makes them better contributors in today’s competitive global society.
CoM: Have you run into any limitations by embracing digital?
SV: Each app has its own strong features along with some limitations (different for each app). When our students encounter an app’s limitation they feel stuck. For example: an app which has a good watercolor effect is not good at creating a textured background for your flower painting.
This can be overcome if you can export just the flower painting (without background) to a different app which allows you to create a great textured background. So we focus not on just using a single app but we teach them to use a workflow or app-mashing, which simply means using apps in combination. Art pieces created in painting apps can be used to create engaging animations in other apps. Students can explore endless possibilities of art making with app-mashing.
Funny story: In one of our Kindergarten intro classes, when we asked, “Can you draw on your iPad?” one kid literally showed us by drawing on the iPad screen using his crayon.
You can check out Vishwakarma’s work on his Flickr page, or at the Mobile Art Academy.
Cult of Mac reader Alvaro P writes, “After upgrading to mavericks, the Preview app doesn’t show the Bookmarks tab anymore. That’s no good, because I need them to quickly access pdf stuff during meetings.”
Having just upgraded my Macbook Air to Mavericks, I figured I’d give it a look. Here’s what I found.
BestRoute Free — Navigation — Free
Now that Halloween is over, the rest of the holidays are clamoring for our attention. And some of them require shopping, which can mean a lot of driving all over town. And if you want to make sure you’re taking the most efficient route possible, you might want to plug your stops into BestRoute Free, a new app that lets you quickly and easily mark waypoints (by searching or just a long tap on the screen). It’ll then tell you the best order in which to make your stops.
It would probably also come in handy if you suddenly had to deliver a bunch of pizzas or something.
The iPad Air has been on sale for nearly 12 hours now and early reports are starting to indicate that the higher end models are becoming scarce as initial supply is dwindling. It may not be quite as hard to get your hands on the iPad Air as a the gold iPhone 5s, but our pal who made the extremely useful iPhone Tracker tool is back with an update that will help you find the iPad Air you want.
The simple web app scrapes data from store.apple.com for the most up-to-date info on local pick-up options for the iPad Air. A chart of green and red squares indicate whether local Apple Stores have stock of 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB units in the color of your choice, so you can know where to head to for the best shot at getting the iPad you want.
Apple Tracker has also been updated to support stock information on the iPad mini with Retina display too once it becomes available this month. Use the drop downs to select the color and carrier you want, press submit and viola. There’s even a purchase button at the bottom of each inventory listing to speed up the shopping process.
Source: Apple Tracker
If you fancy yourself an expert on abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols, you might want to have a go at Name It!, a new trivia game that focuses on those three things (known collectively — and somewhat awkwardly — as “AASs”). It’s a pretty niche subject, really, but the game covers a lot of ground, including such disparate topics as Presidential history (“POTUS”) and the term “YOLO,” which stands for “I have failed at life.”
Name It! throws a startling number of questions at you across four rounds. And it’s all great fun until you get tired of it.
You can never have too many headphones. I’ve written before about how I’ve got different ones for different use cases, so when an ergonomic set of earbuds suited for the iPhone 5, 5S, and 5C become available at a low price — well…I’m all ears.
Cult of Mac has a set of earbuds that meets that criteria, The iPhone 5/5S/5C headphones are only $14.99, but you’ll also get free shipping to select countries. Plus, if you buy two pairs, you’ll get one at 50% off the already low price!
Wondering what to download first on your new iPad Air? If you’re an Angry Birds fan, you’ll probably want to get the new Angry Birds Star Wars II update, which adds a bunch of new “secret” levels, new characters — including silver C3PO and Darth Sidious — and more.
Unless you got incredibly drunk last night and you don’t know what day it is, you’re probably already aware of the fact that the iPad Air launches today. And if you don’t want to venture out and wait in line to get one, you can order yours now from the Apple online store.
If you picked up a new iPhone 5s this year, you’d better take good care of its home button, because you can no longer pick up a cheap replacement on eBay and fit it yourself. The repair experts at mendmyi have discovered that Apple pairs every Touch ID sensor with an A7 chip, and if you install a home button that doesn’t match up, Touch ID simply won’t work.
Forget for a moment all the talk about Apple’s recent quarter financials disappointing Wall Street analysts — and instead focus on two “nuggets” from Apple’s recently released 88-page Form 10-K, as picked up by ISI’s Brian Marshall.
In a note to clients sent Thursday, Marshall notes that not only is Apple’s $11 billion in projected capital expenditures for fiscal 2014 a double-digit increase for a company already “the single largest CapEx spender” in his “Big 7 Hyperscale group”, but also that Apple generates “off-the-charts” revenue-per-head metric compared to the other IT and networking companies he covers — which includes Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), Facebook (FB) and Yahoo (YHOO).
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un might be an Apple user, but that doesn’t mean that North Korea’s state-run computer agency doesn’t see the value of launching a tablet of its own.
Costing around $250, the Korea Computer Center’s Samjiyon SA-70 has a 7-inch screen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB internal memory, and a card slot equipped with an 8 GB micro SD memory card. There is also a 2 mega pixel camera, microphone, gyro sensor. Currently there’s no way to connect to the Internet, although there is an extendable antenna for receiving state television signals.
Apple had added its name to an open letter from the tech industry — also signed by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL and Yahoo! — demanding “oversight and accountability” of NSA surveillance.
The letter, sent Thursday, was addressed to the sponsors of the USA Freedom Act, a legislation designed to end bulk data collection by the National Security Agency. It claims that the tech industry (including Apple) welcome debate about the best way to further national security, while also protecting individual user privacy interests.