Clover Paint - a neat Android Art App

* Update:
Quick Guide: Clover Paint User Guide (click Download on the right hand side)
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CloverPaint
Website (Japanese): Clover Paint公式トップ
Twitter (Japanese): www.twitter.com/Clover_Paint

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Clover Paint is an Android art app with rich features and deep complexity
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...1bGwsMSwyLDEsImZhcmVhc 3QuQ2xvdmVyUGFpbnQiXQ..

(image taken from Play store)

[video=youtube_share;kFLaKEA8IYk]http://youtu.be/kFLaKEA8IYk[/video]​

The UI is quite confusing at first but when you get the gist of it and spend time playing with the settings, it becomes very fluid. Also if you experience pointer off-setting, long press on Settings/Gallery button (the one with 9 small squares) and swipe to Stylus. In the settings page, click on Pen pointer until the smaller footprint says For stylus (right(left)-handed) or click on Calibrate for calibration.

Key features (v1.22):

----- LAYER SYSTEM
* Theoretically unlimited number of layers (as device memory serves)
* Custom canvas size
* .PSD Import and Export
* Basic functions includes creating, cloning, merging and deleting layers
* Advanced functions includes Layer lock, Transparency (Alpha) lock and Clipping, in addition with 11 Blend modes

----- ADVANCE BRUSH SYSTEM
* Custom brush (!) with Perlin noise support
* Number of Blend modes with basic parameters for Brush Size, Opacity and Flow
* Jitter effect creates scatter effect for brush strokes and colors. Jitter supports Perlin noise and white noise settings.
* Blur and Smudge
* Tilt support (for Wacom® Cintiq® Companion)
* Pressure, speed and time effect. Devices with non-digitized pen can simulate pen pressure to some extend by speed or time effect.
And a lot more…

----- SELECTION TOOL
* Free-hand selection (Lasso tool), Rectangular Marquee tool, Quick selection (Wand tool)
* Add, subtract, replace selected areas
* Cut/Copy selected area and Paste into a new layer
* Mask support

----- TRANSFORM & MOVE
* Non-uniform and uniform transformation tool with Skew and Perspective tool
* Precise move of transformation with numeric inputs

----- CUSTOM HOTKEYS AND SHORTCUTS
Boost productivity with Hotkeys and Shortcuts (termed “Clovers&#8221
* Hotkeys can be assigned to touch gestures, hardware keys, keyboards and other input devices
* “Clovers” can be created for almost every tool and your favourite brush anywhere on the screen

*** Please try Clover Memo LITE (free) before purchasing Clover Paint. Clover Memo LITE is a lite version of Clover Paint with stripped down brush and layer system, but still has most of its fundamental features intact.
*** The initial learning curve is particularly steep for many users. The following tutorial hopefully can walk you through the powerful tools in Clover Paint. Clover Paint User Guide
We also recommend a free nice morning/day/night at the weekend to customize the app to your favorite.

 

Cleft,
This looks very cool, and indeed may be a "painting" option to go along with other lineart options such as LayerPaint. What device are you drawing on? Can you give us more specifics about how the program works? How does it compare to LayerPaint (the most often suggested art program for lineart around here). For example...

-what file formats can you save as? PSD? PNG? Can you somehow export things with layers intact?
-How do brushes work?-- for example, can you "make" brushes that you import? Or does the program provide you with the "head" which you then set the parameters for?
-How doe the blur and smudge work? Are there parameters for it? Ways to get it to blur/smudge in different ways?
-Can you better explain the shortcut system? It looks like all those little green squares do stuff?

The program seems very functional. It's a shame that the descriptive info is so "engrishy". On the app page you link to, it shows a pic of the settings page. It's all in Japanese. Is it translated into English on the app that you bought? Or is it only half-translated?

Thanks for sharing this. I would love to hear more about it.

 

Man.. I was too excited in drawing that totally ignore checking up formats supported. Sadly Clover Paint only exports to PNG and JPEG, no PSD, no layers intact. Hope it will support these features soon since the developer is really responsive and productive.

I’m using a ThinkPad Tablet (1) powered by n-trig and the app is fully translated btw.

IMO Clover Paint is still much better than LayerPaint. LP is only superior in the ability to import and export PSD files, it doesn’t do any better in other terms and takes so many clicks to access certain tools, which makes LP no-brainer for me. In contrast, CP allows large number of shortcuts (the green squares), which have options to save size, opacity, flow or colour independently. You can place those green squares (Clovers) in the bottom sidebar or anywhere on the canvas. You can also assigned favourite colours to the square on the right sidebar. Not to mention that you can assigned different tools for pen’s button, pen’s button hovering and other hardware buttons

As for brushes, it doesn’t support user-defined custom brush but the the developer said it is on the very top of his to-do list when I dropped an email about the same query. At this time, the app provides pen, airbrush, oil, water color and some which I’m not familiar with. Brush system resembles Photoshop’s a lot with size-, opacity- and flow-meter, accompanied with jitter, pressure and some more effects in settings page.

Blur and Smudge (Finger) also work likely the same with their counterparts in PS, except for Finger which flow-meter controls strength instead of opacity-. I need to push pressure effect on size in Finger’s settings page for desired effect though.

In sum, CP is surprisingly powerful. Now just wait for custom brush, transform ability and PSD support will I never envy iPad users for having Procreate again.

 

PSD is most important to me, because it lets one really export.

Custom brushes would be awesome too, but I've not seen them on any Android apps yet though.

PSD is a non starter for me though. If he can get that on the app, that'll be a very cool thing though!

 

Sorry it's a deal-breaker for you. I just dropped another email, hope he would consider it

 

Oh, sketching is cool, so i think the app has real promise, but if you really want to be able to transfer it to another device later and work on it more, layers are pretty essential, ya know?

It's great to know the dveloper is responsive though. I look forward to seeing where it goes!

 

While Clover Paint could use some improvements, I bought it anyway to support the developer. My Galaxy Note was $500. Clover paint is $5. Easy purchase!

The first good things I noticed were all the things that cleft mentioned in his excellent review.

The first bad thing I noticed is that it's stuck in portrait mode. No landscape which is how I normally sketch.

Also the pen tip detection is off my several millimeters. Since I had just opened my tablet today I thought maybe I needed some calibration (although I never have before), but when I went over to SBP, it was fine.

But I still love the idea behind this app and am glad to support the developer. Looks like he wrote this for modern Android tablets which are full fledged PCs at this point.

 

@cleft, maybe you could add a YouTube vid of a live Clover Paint sketch. I couldn't find any out there (yet).

 

I'd email the developer about your needs. I did so today about exporting as PSD. He responded quickly and let me know it was on his list. So that's good news. If you mentioned landscape versus portrait, it'd atleast be on his list. There much to like about the program. I particularly like that it's clearly deblopd from the bottom up to be used with a pen and touch combo. The clover shortcuts are a great idea, and I like the smudge with finger concept.

 

@Art_N00b: I'd love to make a vid, yet need to finish the applications for postgrad study first, arghh.

Maybe you need to touch and hold on Settings/Gallery button (the one with 9 squares) and swipe to Stylus. In the settings page, click on Pen pointer until the smaller footprint says For stylus (right(left)-handed) or just calibrate the pen.