Fun Freetime: iLuv Drawing

I recently had the chance to review iLuv Drawing, an app from Learn with Fun Apps. The iLuv Drawing apps (people, animals, dinosaurs, and monsters) were developed by a mother for her kids, and they're kid-friendly, with a very pleasant-sounding child's voice guiding the experiences. My daughters, 2 and 4, both love art, and even my 2-year-old was able to have fun with this app, just by watching the cause-and-effect as she moved around, and my 4-year-old was able to figure out quickly how to draw what she wanted to draw. I had a chance to interview the founder, who can describe the app and its benefits much better than I can.

1) What was the inspiration behind creating iLuv Drawing?

I created iLuv Drawing apps when my daughter often asked me “Mom, can you tell me how to draw ___?” . I got her how to draw books, but following those instructions on paper for a 4 year old was hard and the end result was not often great! So, I started looking for iPad apps where she was allowed to make as many mistakes as she could. But I did not find any such app. So, I decided to create one.

iLuv Drawing apps takes the classic step by step drawing approach and combines it with the traceability features of iPhone and iPad devices thus learning to draw a very easy process for little kids. iLuv Drawing closes a gap between drawing apps with blank pages, or just coloring apps where you don't get to draw and very few learn to draw apps with very little content and limited feature set.

The drawing apps available in the app store provide blank pages and drawing and coloring tools. Some kids are often intimidated by the blank pages because they don't know what to draw.

There are also a lot of coloring apps, where kids can color at the touch of a finger (with auto fill feature). These apps often do not offer much educational value because they do not teach you how to draw!

iLuv Drawing apps combine all the features of drawing, coloring and how to draw apps with following features and content:

- Drawing and editing features, and blank pages to practice what they learned or draw free hand.
- 30+ colors, paint brush and paint bucket feature; editing tools such as eraser, redo/undo etc; and decorating features such as custom backgrounds and stickers.
- With 40 animals, 20 monsters, 20 kids drawings, 19 dinosaurs, there is a lot of content and systematic step by step instructions with simplified traceable steps.

With iLuv Drawing apps our ultimate goal is to create love for drawing making it easy for kids of all ages.

2) What ages is this app appropriate for, and what skills does it help develop?

These apps are appropriate for kids age 4 and up. Kids of various age groups will learn many different skills with iLuv Drawing apps. Kids age 4 to 6 are still learning focus, fine motor skills, process following, achieving goals etc.; while older kids are actually learning how to draw recognizable characters such as animals, people, dinosaurs, monsters etc. We also have many parents telling us that they use it themselves too. 

Skills:

- Basics of drawing recognizable characters
- Observation skills
- Fine Motor Skills
- Spatial understanding
- Following directions (visual and verbal)
- Focus
- Achieving a goal to promote self confidence
- Many speech language therapists use this app for vocabulary building, following directions, sequencing (what did you draw 1st, 2nd etc.), as a conversational carryover and a reinforcer.

3) What are the advantages of developing early abilities in drawing?

I always refer to this favorite article of mine.

There are many advantages of developing early abilities in drawing (as quoted in this article)

- Art provides useful outlet to express themselves because little kids lack the breadth of vocabulary necessary to articulate all of the complexities of their thoughts and emotions.
- Art helps them to express, communicate and create order.
- Drawing stimulates the brain to grow in the areas that learn how to observe.
- Drawing is the best starter art for children.

Other benefits include manual dexterity, fine motor skills, focus, self confidence, achieving a goal, following directions etc.

4) What do your own kids think is the best thing about the app?

My daughter who is 6 years old loves that she can actually draw many animals, dinosaurs, and people doing various things. She loves the fact that she can use the backgrounds and stickers to decorate her finished drawing. She often uses it to create cards for her friends and she loves to share her drawings with me.

My son who is 3 years old enjoys the tracing part and I can see that he is really focused on doing so because the end result is his favorite animal, or monster or a dinosaur. He is proud that his drawing comes out really nice!

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of the app as a thank-you for this post.