uDraw art trend expands to new consoles

— -- In 2010, THQ introduced a way to create art and play games on the Wii using a special tablet controller. Called the uDraw GameTablet, this peripheral let families draw inside games and use their Wii as an art studio. THQ has just released a new uDraw GameTablet, this time for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

Packaged in a bundle called "uDraw GameTablet with uDraw Studio: Instant Artist," families get the iPad-like tablet along with the "uDraw Studio: Instant Artist" game. The tablet measures about 9.5 by 6 inches and works wirelessly with the HD consoles. It has traditional gaming buttons as well as an attached stylus and runs on three AA batteries. Like the iPad, you can pinch or expand your fingers to zoom out or in; and it features motion controls which allow you to tilt to play. Since the drawing tablet shows no graphics, there is a slight learning curve as kids look at the screen while they draw on the tablet.

The enclosed "uDraw Studio: Instant Artist" is a nifty combination of art studio, art lessons, and art camp. Kids access these three choices from the game's main menu.

By selecting Art Camp, kids can explore six lighthearted art-based activities that utilize the drawing surface of the tablet or its motion controls. There are traditional coloring book pages to fill in using the on-screen art tools, as well as paint-by-numbers and dot-to-dot pictures. The dot-to-dot pictures are a little hard to do unless you remember to zoom into the painting using your fingers or the directional pad. More fun are the games of "Tilt Maze" and "Tilt Coloring," where you control a ball of paint as it goes through mazes or to find new pots of paint on the screen. "Alien Splat" is a mediocre arcade game where you whack aliens who fly onto your canvas. When swatted, they leave splashes of color on your canvas.

The "Art School" option provides kids with their own fully-voiced art instructor, a cartoon guy named Remmy. Remmy walks kids through 15 art lessons that teach basic art concepts, such as how to draw shapes, shadows, still life and landscapes. Each lesson has many steps, but the game pauses to let kids draw as they are taught. When kids are done, they can save their masterpieces and even send them to a special website for printing and sharing online. Kids will enjoy sharing their artwork with their parents by activating a cool feature that lets parents see a video showing the artwork in progress, set at speeds of up to 8 times the speed of its creation.

The "Art Studio" lets kids express their creativity however they want. It offers 11 brush types, from paint brushes to crayons to chalk to fill-buckets. The brushes have many options including mimicking real world use by pressing harder on the stylus, so that your line on the screen appears darker. You can even set a paint brush stroke to appear to run out of paint at the end of the stroke.

Color palettes are simple to set up with unlimited color choices thanks to a mixing wheel similar to what you find on your computer when you want to change the color of the screen.

Kids will want to explore the stamps menu because there is a wide variety of animated stamps. You can make your painting look like it is actually raining, or place an adorable kitten in your foreground that will wave its paw at you.