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Livebrush is a fantastic new organic drawing application built on Adobe AIR by David Fasullo. Not just a desktop application but also a design community encouraging the creation of organic art together with extensions to the application by the community.

This is a paid for application but you can try and play with the lite version before making that purchase of $10 for the full Livebrush Pro app.

Livebrush is a drawing application. It employs an easy-to-use brush tool that reacts to your gesture. By combining simple motion controls with brush styles, Livebrush offers a fun and unique way to create graphics

The best way to describe Livebrush is as a line drawing tool on steroids. There are an overwhelming number of options available for your brush strokes including a standard set of 100 styles and decorators. Each of these can then be customised and tailored to suite your style and project.

You control the speed, angle width and other parameters for your brush stroke. Detailed colour options are available to really enhance that drawing.

See some example artworks in my flickr account here and here. I’m sure you can all do a lot better than this! The Livebrush flickr account is located here.

Video review

Design eye

The interface follows some common conventions for such drawing apps like Photoshop, Illustrator etc. Although I found some standard interactions were not there. Resizing the app smaller chopped the artboard and no scrollbars were created. The iconography on the layers palette was a little non intuitive. Where I was expecting a trash can for delete I had a cross on a button in the middle. Also the lack of tooltips as a guide made heavy work of the UI.

Also Don’t assume that I want the application to open up to the maximum width of my screen.

In some instances I found there were just too many options especially for a beginner like myself. A simple task like finding out how to change the line / brush colour was not as clear as it could be. The status text at the top ( Project New Project as an example) really look like buttons, I was trying to click them to create a new project.

Interface woes aside this app produces some truly stunning pieces of art that you can export as SVG, or PNG. There is an export layers option too.

Technical eye

This is a comprehensive Adobe AIR application built using FLash CS4, ActionScript 3 and the Adobe AIR framework.

In summary

Try this Adobe AIR application for some truly different organic type art for your projects. I can see this begin useful for backdrops to websites, posters and music promotions. When combined with your work in Photoshop this will be invaluable.

Being a paid for application costing only $10 USD you can’t really go wrong. Try it today.