Sketching with a Palm Pilot

Author: Scott Burkett

Palm V [ Purchase your own: $279.99 ]

The Palm Pilot is undoubtedly the king of the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) market. Out of the box, it sports all sorts of personal applications, such as e-mail, an address book, and even a calendar. However, it can also be a wonderful sketching device. Yep!  Read on...

TealPoint Software (www.tealpoint.com) offers a really neat Palm program called TealPaint.  Artists, don't miss it! For only $17.95 (at the time of this writing), you can own this little gem. The program is shareware, so feel free to download it and try it out. No need to carry messy art supplies around all the time.  Just carry your Palm! A Palm Pilot running TealPaint is a perfect tool for creating thumbnail sketches on location. Image: The color version running on the Palm IIIc (the color model)

For those that don't own the color version (most don't), have no fear - it still runs great on the black/white models. What kind of images can you sketch? Well, anything really - consider the image to the right, which is a quick thumbnail sketch of a landscape, complete with background mountains and clouds, foreground tree, and split-rail fence. :-) Here are a few others that your fearless editor whipped up (shown roughly actual size):

Another landscape	Still another landscape...
A Portrait!	A silly little house

What kinds of tools are available? Plenty! Believe it or not, it will even animate images! Consider these screenshots from a Palm V:

The Image Manager	Primary Tools	Textures
Pen/Brush Types	Sample Menu Options	The Animation Menu

You can transfer your sketches to your PC or Mac, which can then be printed for use as reference in the studio.  For that matter, you can even strap your Palm Pilot to your easel! :-)  A quick rundown of features: Color support (for Palm devices that support it) Multiple image databases Multiple annotated records Basic Animation functions Dithered thumbnail images View-only browsing mode Horizontal and Vertical scrolling oversized images Magnified draw mode Freehand draw tool Line draw tool Constrained 45 and 90-degree line tool Box, filled box draw Rounded box, filled rounded box Circle, filled circle Erase tool Paint bucket Text tool with selectable fonts Polygon tool Filled shape tool Hand page-movement tool Spotty free-draw tool Selector tool User-defined image templates Coordinate-based lasso adjust 16 Draw patterns 12 Brushes Cut/Copy/Paste images 90-degree copy-buffer image rotation Paste-to-fit image scaling Configurable hardware button mapping Undo Horizonal and Vertical Flipping Image compression Screen-grabbing import function TealPaint Image Manager, a Windows import, export, and print utility PicUtil, DOS command-line batch image converter Don't miss the TealPaint support site (www.tealpoint.com), which also features a gallery of art submitted by users. Hot Picks! If you don't yet own a Palm Pilot, have no fear!  You can now purchase them right here, online, through WetCanvas! Palm V [ Purchase your own: $279.99 ]