Thursday, March 03, 2016
An Innovative Pen That Lets You "Borrow the Colors Around You"
Mental Floss: Familiar with the Photoshop tool called the eye dropper, which gives an artist the power to pull colors from any background? Mashable recently shared a product called the Scribble Pen that brings that color-matching ability to the real world, using a sensor and advanced internal ink-mixing technology.
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To be perfectly honest, this pen seem really cool, but more of a need gadget to show people than anything else. I suppose having one pen that can write in any color is pretty cool, but once again, how often do you need a pen to be this exact shade of green. In terms of grabbing the colors of objects around you, I don’t think that would be particularly useful. Objects as we see them aren’t just one color. This is pretty apparent with digital color pickers as well. If you have a photo of an object and you color pick on three different spots you will get three different colors.
I went to their website and watch the ad, and I was pretty unimpressed. The first scene was an artist having trouble with her paintings. She then used the pen, but it didn’t do anything for her that a normal pen wouldn’t have. The said “a great tool can help an artist see things in a different light”, but I don’t think an artist needs a fancy color matching pen to notice that apples are red. Then a couple used it to put the color they were going to paint their wall into a digital room decorating program of some sort, but it really doesn’t seem like what they did would’ve been any harder if they just picked a very similar color through a digital color picker since everything in the room will change with lighting anyway, and the exact color of what they buy will be determined by what is marketed. Next was a woman putting an outfit together, and I didn’t see the pen’s purpose in that. Was she checking to see if her pants would match her shirt? Why did she need this pen for that? They were both in her closet. She could’ve just grabbed the pants, put them next to the shirt, and seen how it looks. How did the pen help? Next a woman used Scribble to match her makeup. I don’t know much about makeup, so I could be wrong about this, but isn’t there some level of color change when the makeup is applied? Isn’t the color of the blush in the container not the color people’s cheeks turn when they wear it? On top of that, I’m really not convinced that her putting the color picker up to her skin actually would’ve given any useful information given that there is a lot of variation within a person’s skin tone. My guess is she can do her makeup just fine after enough life experience of knowing what she thinks looks good on her/ what she has seen on other people. The next scene was a girl drawing with the pen, and that part made sense to me, I could see kids having a lot of fun with Scribble. Her dad then adding to her drawing was cute, but I don’t think they needed Scribble for that. Making a physical drawing digital and then putting it in a program to continue working on it digitally is nothing new. I’m very curious how this pen works and what practical uses people see for it, because to me, though this technology could later become productive, this pen doesn’t seem particularly useful, and nothing they showed in the ad seemed like it would’ve been made significantly better using this pen.
I’ve seen ideas for this pen for a while now and i think it’s a really cool idea, but even this video doesn't make me really want to get the pen. My biggest problem with the video was that the woman was drawing on a canvas with the pen. It’s just impractical. Especially since she ended up painting right over it. If they wanted to show an artist creating traditional art (as opposed to digital art) they should have gotten someone who actually uses pen as their primary form of art. That being said, the scanning feature of the pen that lets you save the colors around your house so you can better interior design is really cool. Also using the colors around you for digital art is a nice addition, but did that really need to be it’s own separate thing? When taking into consideration the way lighting affects the colors on any object, scanning one spot is not going to really get you anywhere with mixing colors. You’re going to need to go in and pick out all the shades and highlights anyway.
In the end, I really like the concept behind this pen, it’s just not where it can be. When they find out how to make a felt tip instead of the pen tip (or really anything wider than the pen), I can see a lot more artists using it for traditional art, but I think it’s going to be stuck in stylus land for a while.
This is definitely very cool technology, especially when considering that it is only $250 and can last for up to 15 hours on a charge. But this definitely isn’t a good drawing tool by any means, as even in the commercial it was pointless. The woman hat used it to sketch out her painting ended up painting over it, so she didn’t need her two hundred and forty-nine-dollar pen to get that exact shade of apple red, and the girl that drew her cat literally just scanned black. That’s like every pen.
All of that aside, I do think this type of technology would be great for digital art, as I think it opens up the standard color picker you see on most digital drawing programs. Sometimes you just can’t pick it right from the rainbow wheel. I also think the string colors thing will come in handy for events like when you’re shopping and you need to know just what shade beige your Michael Kohrs bag is. Typical day in my life.
I can’t really understand why this pen would be especially useful for an artist, unless they either made hyper realistic images, or they were in a line of work like scenic painting where they spent a lot of time color matching. However, I definitely understand how much fun it could be to play with, especially with the interaction between real and virtual space where you can save colors from the world around you to draw with on your computer. Like Wong said in this article, I would also worry about this being a cool idea and nothing more. A couple years ago I bought the Wacom Inkling pen which is supposed to transfer your drawings into virtual space in real time as you draw. The technology just didn’t work well enough for it to have been worth it and I eventually ended up selling the pen on EBay. With a product like the scribble pen I would wait until other people have tested it out and also find a way to try one out before purchasing it myself.
This is a really cool idea, and reminds me a lot of those 3D printing pens that came out a few years ago. They didn't really catch on as I have never seen one in real life, but we'll see about this one!
One possible criticism I foresee about this product is the usual "traditional vs. digital" art debate. Many traditional artist believe that art made digitally is not as valid as traditional art because "they have an undo button!" This could be another example of this. "They have a pen that literally picks colors for them!" Well, what I have to say to that is, have you ever tried to create a digital painting to the standards you hold your oil painting? It takes just as much work and time (maybe less if you include drying time, but I am not in this scenario). These types of technological advancement don't detract from the ability of the artist - they simply add to the form. An artist is not the sum of his or her tools. An artist is someone who can use those tools to convey their message. And if they wanna drop 200 bucks on this pen to create their art, who cares!
If you have to explain the use of a product in a commercial for it, it's a useless product. The technology is interesting. I'm sure there are amazing applications for the ability to scan a color and convert it and communicate with a color mixer (of sorts). Perhaps the technology could be used to find the exact paint color of your walls. Or you could just go to home depot, grab a bunch of similar color swatches, take it home and test it. Maybe you can pick up some other colors that you like and then re-paint the room? I admire the technology. I admire digital artists for the incredible work they do (I believe that computers are magical and that I'll never understand how they work, I admire people who do). I just cannot see a purpose in this exact product. Continuing on the digital art thing, why do you even need a color grabber pen? why not just pick out a similar shade of orange rather than scanning it from a father's day card? Why do you need to scan a cat to tell that it has black fur? Just use your eyes. They are substantially cheaper.
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