When I first got a glimpse of the Nomad Brush products I was quickly excited. A brush for your iPad and in theory your iPhone and iPod touch. Seemed to me, an amazing idea.
By no means is the brush a new concept, but for the iPad it is. A variety of designs are available with brushes designed for children, a brush designed specifically for your iPhone and iPod touch but the brushes we have are the Compose series. These appear to be the flagship Nomad Brush at present and they are very stylish. The classy hand crafted aluminium frame feels great in the hand and I haven't got a clue to what the bristles are made out of, but it’s a very clever inductive material.
The Compose is unique in having two bristle tips which are interchangeable onto either end of the brush. Both differ from one another, included was a long tip and a glide tip, this tip has very small bristles.
Currently we all use painting and drawing Apps on the iPad with our fingers and maybe a stylus. And a quick YouTube search for 'painting iPad' will gather some amazing results of people using iPads to draw incredible pieces of art using just their fingers. A stylus on the other hand might be great for drawing but painting needs to be done by a brush.
Painting with the Nomad brush is so much more satisfying compared to using your finger or a stylus. I personally prefer painting to writing with a pen or pencil, a brush seems very intuitive and something which won’t go away. So it’s quite well suited for the iPad. Nomad recommend I try a selection of painting Apps which I did. The ones I downloaded were ArtRage, Zen Brush and Brushes. All very different Apps, giving very different results but all had one thing in common which was that they worked superbly with the Nomad Brushes. It really felt as if I was painting and I got some terrific bits of art completed in the process.
The iPad screen doesn’t have any issues detecting the bristles. You can quite lightly press against the screen while painting and it tracks every movement happily with either one of the interchangeable bristle tips. When painting the brush glides along the glossy iPad screen making it even more satisfying to use. The combo works flawlessly and of course will work to use the iPad's OS with certain functionalities such as swiping and selecting. But it also worked rather too well with some games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope.
My verdict is that it doesn’t matter whether your an artist who paints for a living or just a doodler, if you like what you see, definitely pick yourself up a Nomad Brush. The superb build, topped with luxurious style and great functionality make this an excellent product. Plus you don’t have to wash your brush after you're done painting.
