Art Academy for the Wii U is more of an app than a game, but its object is to teach people to draw and paint using the Wii U gamepad. A test of whether it is successful would be whether the skills learned within it are transferrable to proper pencil and paper media outside the app. I pulled out my easel and plonked the gamepad on it. Oh the conclusions I’ve drawn!
2013’s Art Academy Sketchpad app appeared to be not much more than a way to pass the time sketching on the Wii U gamepad (you know, lounging there, sketching and pretending there weren’t some insanely awesome games to play on the amazing little console). The section on “lessons” always displayed the foreboding message “coming soon”, and no one paid much mind to the notice, and happily sketched and painted away. Now we have Art Academy: Atelier (“atelier” being the French word for “artist’s studio” or “workshop”, and I only know this because Google Translate told me so), which has all most of the features you could want in an art app. And since I figure the best way to show how well the program works is to show you the results…all the screenshots here are the results of actual digital paintings straight from Art Academy: Atelier itself, and all my own work. The first three images are direct results of following the lessons.
To start with, there are around 30 lessons all told, divided into beginner’s classes, advanced classes, and five lessons detailing each of the different media (pencils, pastels, coloured pencils, etc). The lessons are led by a really sweet old guy named Vince (the same guy who taught in all the prior Art Academy games). The beginner’s lessons start fairly gently, too, with emphasis on looking at the subject and capturing its essence on paper. The subject you are drawing displays on the TV while you draw on the Gamepad, but you can switch the TV display to show Vince’s tutorial drawing, or even your own. The subject matter gets more complicated as you progress, but each lessons builds on the prior ones, and you can only progress through the lessons one at a time, since you have to unlock the later lessons by completing the earlier ones. At the end of the lesson…well, the lesson ends. You’re not judged on your artwork, because art is about expressing yourself, not about a score. So how well you think you did depends purely on your own critical eye. I’ll say this much, though: doing a lesson more than once allows you to compare your progress as a set of “before and after” images.
The thing I really like about Atelier is the fact that you’re sitting with a stylus and drawing and using the same motions that you would when using pencils or pastels. On the other hand, the motions don’t translate as well to paintbrushes, which use a different set of muscles. But that’s a minor digression. On the subject on minor digressions, Vince makes a good few of these during the lessons, talking about the mindset of art, how to look at things, and even how other artists have tried to capture the essence of the subject at hand. Far from being annoying, these digressions actually make it feel as if you’re being taught by a live human teacher.
Once you’ve exhausted the lessons, you can hit up the free paint area, which uses the same “display the subject on the TV” method as the lessons. The app provides a number of reference photos for you to practice on, but if you have your own, you can just shove them on an SD card, plug it into the Wii U, and draw that instead. Once you’re done, it’s a simple matter to upload the artwork to Miiverse, or if you’re feeling more talented than usual, to YouTube, where your viewers will be shown a timelapse of your drawing. If you have a DeviantArt account, or want to post the art online, you’ll have to export the images to an SD card and upload it that way.
My one and only downside here is that I feel that the lessons could be taken much, much further. There is so much to learn about drawing and sketching, and Art Academy Atelier pretty much brushes the surface of expressing yourself through art while learning how to draw what you see, instead of drawing what you think you see. I also feel that it would have been a wonderful tool for teaching more art history than it currently does. It touches on the occasional artist here and there, but there’s no teaching of what to appreciate about various artists and how to emulate or evaluate their styles. But really, I’m nitpicking here–as it is, there’s a decent amount of content within the lessons. And more a “wishlist” thing than an actual downside, I do wish that the airbrush was one of the media allowed to us, along with proper lessons on airbrushing and masking.
If you feel like displaying your work, there’s also a virtual art gallery where you can hang and frame your digital artwork, and walk through it like you would a real gallery. I can’t say much more than that about it, because that’s it–a place to see artwork. It’s a nice touch to be able to walk through it. I do, however, apologize for the wonky-looking Mario below. I DID say I’m not a great artist. Yet. A few more hours with Art Academy: Atelier, however…
The proper measure of how successful Atelier is would be to take someone who’s rubbish at drawing, put them through the lessons, and then compare artwork. If you happen to be one of these people, please get in touch with me, because I’d love to know how well you do.
On its own, though, Art Academy: Atelier is a wonderful teaching app and a brilliant way of expressing yourself without the mess and preparation that goes into creating a work of art. I’m certainly no great artist, but I do feel as if Art Academy: Atelier has helped me get some of the way there–and if that’s all the motivation that’s needed, I’d say it succeeds in the most brilliant of ways.
Final Score: 9 Painted Prawns out of 10
Detailed Information:
Developer: Headstrong Games
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Wii U (eShop title)
Age Rating: N/A
RRP: TBA
Website: http://www.nintendo.co.za/Games/Wii-U/Art-Academy-Atelier-893364.htm