My daughter has really honed her drawing ability and has turned into a great little artist. (If I do say so myself.) She even adds the requisite eyelashes to all of her female subjects. While she unleashes a lot of her creative energy with paper and markers, she also likes to dabble in digital arts and we have discovered another creative art app for iPad we love called Mini Monet that, truth be told, we both have fun with.
Set among the cobblestone streets of Paris and Eiffel Tower, which give it an immediate thumbs-up from me, the Mini Monet app offers a slew of drawing, coloring, tracing and sticker-ing activities for creative kids.
You can touch the easels of several different beret-wearing kids at the bottom to access the various activities (because of course every French artist wears a beret), and I like that Mini Monet offers more than just the standard touch, tap and color-fill a picture.
There are “symmetry” art activities in which kids can try and mimic the other half of a drawing, plus more than 120 coloring pages and blank pages for kids to get really creative. Even though the basic functions like picking a paint brush or choosing a color are pretty self-explanatory, it did take me a couple of taps and tries to figure out how things worked, so I’d recommend this for kids about 4 and up.
The app also offers an “Art Club” where kids can share their masterpieces in a safe way, which I don’t think is necessary, but still it’s a way for kids to see a broader gallery from other users. (You can control the settings around the share functionality so make sure you check that out before you hand your tablet over.) I’m also not crazy about the transaction aspect to the app–kids can earn coins that they use to unlock additional coloring pages from the art store. But those features are easy enough to bypass and ignore altogether.
And if your little artist is anything like mine, chances are she’ll be too busy drawing on those eyelashes to care about some coins.
Mini Monet art app for iPad is available in iTunes for $1.99.
