[Shardz]

App: Clover Paint v1.24.108
Developer: FAREAST Inc.
Category: Graphics
Price: $7.56
IAP: $19.17

Clover Paint is a feature rich painting application with extremely deep complexity and an extraordinary amount of options, functions and useful tools at your disposal. It essentially presents a sketchbook with customizable canvas size, highly sophisticated brush and layer system, plus custom shortcuts for productivity, which are called clovers. Nearly everything within the interface may be created into a clover and placed anywhere on the screen as you see fit, allowing for fast switching between the usual repetitive tasks. I would consider productivity to be most comfortable using a device with at least a nine inch screen, but Clover Paint will function perfectly on anything less just as well. Unarguably, the most debated issue of this app is the complex and equally confusing interface, which manages to baffle most users until they figure out the nuances that make it so powerful. There is a Clover Paint User Guide available on deviantART to get you started with the learning process, which I would consider to be required reading material to avoid initial frustration.

Regarding layers, Clover Paint offers unlimited layers, custom canvas size, PSD import and export, layer lock, transparency lock and clipping, in addition to 11 blend modes to achieve any desirable effect. The complex brush system has custom shapes and texture with Perlin noise, blend modes with settings for brush size, opacity and flow, jitter, blur and smudge, along with pressure, speed and time effects for digitized pens. The app will also make do with non-digitized pens to simulate pen pressure effects with speed or time. Clover Paint delivers the most robust brush editor to the Android platform of any paint and sketch available, bar none. However, as would be expected coming from this particular developer, it will require some time and concentrated effort to understand the mechanics completely. If you can imagine it, you can probably create it with this unique and thorough brush editor, which could be comparable to Photoshop's editor.

The selection functions are equally powerful with a lasso, rectangular marquee and wand tool where you may add, subtract, and replace selected areas. You can cut and copy selected areas and paste into a new layer, and also includes mask support, as well. The non-uniform and uniform transformation tool has skew and perspective functions with precise moving of transformations with numeric inputs for accuracy. If there's a function you need for a custom edit, section or mask effect, Clover Paint will accommodate to the fullest extent. Pinch zoom and canvas tilting is in the mix to adjust to your drawing methods, as well as canvas flipping so as not to work with the image in the same position during your session. The clover shortcuts are pivotal for productivity within the app and need to be embraced as much as any tool Clover Paint has to offer.

One thing of note, this app sports a more hefty base price than most paint and sketch apps on the market, and rightfully so with the staggering amount of options and features available for your artistic pleasure. However, there is also a high resolution interface mode as IAP that adds quite a bit more to the interface design and is especially useful if your device screen is at least nine inches. This IAP addition is almost three times the base cost of Clover Paint, which has a lot of users in an uproar since its introduction. The debate is that this app is of a very high caliber and is considered to be a professional tool for serious artists, which is solely created by a single person. One really can't compare $26.73 with the price of Photoshop, especially in a unique portable version that you can carry around with you easily, unlike a laptop or similar. For those who take art creation seriously or simply prefer to own a hybrid paint app with all the bells and whistles you could want, I definitely recommend Clover Paint if you are up to the challenge of learning it.

Pros:

• The most comprehensive paint app for Android.
• A dazzling array of features, functions and tools.
• Using clover shortcuts allow for great productivity.

Cons:

• Expensive IAP cost for high resolution interface.
• A steep learning curve which requires time to master.

Reviewer rating:
Device/OS used: Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7 2012 / KitKat v4.4.4, Lollipop v5.1.1

Purchase at Google Play
Mobilism: Clover Paint v1.24.108