the most natural action to perform with a pen-shaped stylus and a paper-flat touchscreen is draw. and yet no commercial developer has created a truly marvelous piece of drawing software for the ds. as always, homebrew developers provide what publishers forget to.

colors! is a truly marvelous piece of drawing software for the ds and iphone by jens andersson. the most striking difference between it and pictochat, the drawing and chat software built into the ds that many players have used as an impromptu sketchpad, is just what it says: rich, beautiful colors to pictochat’s solid black pen-scribbles. as a dedicated drawing program, colors! is much more robust, transforming the ds into a digital drawing tablet. put more pressure on the stylus to draw sharper lines; use less to draw fainter ones.

my favorite thing about colors!, though, is that it saves an animation of your drawing process for you to send to the online gallery, so that anyone admiring your work can watch – and potentially learn from – how you created it. try it on the above picture, “dino” by boreal boy.

UNRELATED: i’ve written a guest review of maboshi’s arcade for tinycartridge, a blog that’s interested in the ds and the cultural byproducts of videogames. maboshi’s arcade is a downloadable wii game that tries to reimagine cooperative playing and has some interesting ideas about bridging what would otherwise be solitary play experiences.