Can't afford a cintiq? How about drawing with your DS?

I've always wanted a cintiq, but I've never been able to afford one. Recently, I discovered that some people use their Nintendo DS to create art, so I decided to find out more...

For those who still don't know, a Nintendo DS is a pocket sized games console, that has a touch / pressure sensitive screen it uses for input. Put that together with some wonderfully talented coders & hardware hackers, and the result is the DS Homebrew Scene - a collection of applications and games written by enthusiasts, and freely available to the public. To run these applications, your DS has to have a plugin memory card containing the applications you want to run.

One of these applications is DS Colors, a simple sketching program. It has a limited resolution, no undo feature (yet) and no layers. but it's pressure sensitive, which means you can vary the size / opacity of your strokes, and it has a nifty playback feature, which can be used as a sort of undo (play to the point you wish to carry on from), and which can also be used to resize the picture using a nice java application.

Enough talk - lets look at the results.
This is Frankie - a toy rabbit with a teddy bear's ears (it's a long story). This little character was drawn on my DS using colors, and here is Frankie after being vectored and coloured...


In short, this could be a great way to create cartoons, so I'll let you know how it turns out, but for more information on DS Colors, go to http://colors.collectingsmiles.com.