Snap your fingers and wake me up, someone, because ever since I discovered Flowpaper, I’ve been hypnotizing myself with it. Flowpaper is an iPad art app and it’s simple and actually quite limited, but amazingly addictive.
What you do is pick a background. There are a few preset backgrounds – and I rather like black because it makes the art work stand out and be “lit up” — but you can choose your own color from the selector as well. Next, you choose a brush. There are 20 preset brushes, but again, you can create your own.
The type of brush is actually the same; just a swirly netted sort of pattern, and it’s the colors that vary. That’s sad because it would have been fantastic to have different lines and textures to truly complicate matters.
Once you have everything selected, all you have to do is move your finger around and watch the absolute magic unfold. The pressure you use makes a different to the look, as does the speed with which you brush. If you swipe and hold, you’ll find the pattern and lines take on a life of their own and you can then see why it’s called Flow. They fill up and the spectrum of colors unfolds, if the brush is made up of more than one color. You can get some hairy looking effects if you’re not careful and controlled and that part takes some practice.
Those who know how to draw should be able to do wonders with Flowpaper and I can see that some definitely do because there’s a Flickr group showing off users’ artworks. Oddly, the app itself doesn’t share with the Flickr group and only with Facebook and Twitter. Also email and your camera roll, of course.
So, there are lots of interesting things you can do with Flowpaper. You could use a photograph or another artwork as your background and then decorate it with swirls from Flowpaper The nice part is that some of the brushes give the feeling of light, so if the photo is on the dark side, it can look most interesting with the addition of interesting swipes and lines from Flowpaper You can easily put in a fireworks effect, for example. Or write something in lights. You can’t get an actual even flat light leak because the results in Flowpaper are in netted lines. I can tell you I’d have been thrilled if I could have used it to make my own light leaks… I really think light leaks bring magic to a photograph. In some of the Flowpaper drawings here I’ve used a light leak from another app – mostly LensFlare and Plastic Bullet. Sometimes the light leak throws light on the lines of the art work and makes it look quite mysterious and interesting.
You could also use Fowpaper to make interesting wallpapers for your iPad or iPhone. Well, for anywhere, as long as you export it to that device.
I took my iPad to an evening with friends of mine and they were quite rightly fed up of me constantly looking down to make more flowy drawings even though I insisted I was fully involved in the conversation. They’re threatening to invite the iPad next time and skip me. Ouch.
How do I use flow paper on my own image?
To clarify… How do I upload a photo into flowpaper?
Dead easy. Bottom left there’s a button. Click load.