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Pixels Pro was advertised in the iTunes App Store as a "powerful graphics editing program". A high claim, which I found to be untrue.

Pixels Pro was on sale for a limited time, so I decided to try it as a painting tool. It turned out that, on the original iPad, at least, it's not really suited for that. I don't own an iPad 2, so maybe it's tested and tweaked for that device. The further I went along, the slower the app got. I suppose it's all the undos. As a workaround you could save the artwork in the gallery and then edit the saved version.

I'm sure as an editor it is great. As a drawing/painting program it's below average. Procreate is much better, although it has less features. Features isn't everything. In fact, you can have too many of them.

I took a 1024 x 1024 canvas and a photo as the basis for my paining. I drew an outline on top of the photo (in a separate layer) and used several layers to add digital paint, after which I made both the photo and outline invisible in the final output.

Unfortunately, 1024 seems to be the maximum value of either width or height, which makes editing photos not very useful, since most photos are much larger than that (at least 6 megapixels, which is one-sixth of Pixel Pro's pixel count). It outputs a lower resolution than the original and that can't be right.

This idea started with the concept that a horse is like a cabinet with long legs, a head and a tail. Then I considered that the body can be divided up into three parts: the shoulder area, the rear area and the middle area. The random idea was to add beach volleyball for horses.

However, I saw that many people in my hometown have zebra-themed statues in their windowsills. So, it may be that zebras are popular now with the hipster crowd. Who knew!

The zebra is drawn using reference, yet still very naive, as animal drawings go. I'm sure I need to study horses more closely to make it more believable.

I'm trying to establish a coloring technique for this painting program I've bought last December, called Easy Paint Tool SAI.

After doing flat colors (the base colors of the subject), I establish a color palette, which consists of:
1) flattened (base) color
2) slightly darker shade
3) much darker shade
4) slightly lighter shade

The colors are applied each on their own layer, and in the order mentioned. Basically (1) is the base color, (2) is the form shadow, (3) is the cast shadow, and (4) is the highlight. The shades differ not only in lightness but also in hue (color teint). Darker shades tend more towards the blue, while lighter shades tend more to the yellow.

Obviously, there is still a lot to learn here, mostly by practicing a lot with coloring drawings.

To continue the monkey thread, here's an angry monkey for you.

This chimp was drawn from memory, after studying this video from the Jane Goodall Institute on YouTube.

I did some comparative study of humans and cats with chimps. Of course, there's room for improvement. This is only a rough pencil sketch.