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Support for the Left-Handed
If you are a left-handed person, you might have found calligraphy using real brushes or pens and real ink challenging. With TwoToJazz you can easily overcome this problem! Simply go to settings (press the menu button, and then the settings button), and turn on both the "Left Handed" option and the "Right Handed Stroke For Left Handed". Then try to use the calligraphy brush. With a little practice, and perhaps a little bit of adjustment of the "Thumb+Index" setting, you will be creating high quality calligraphic brush strokes.
If you are a right handed person, you can try to act like a left handed person by turning on the "Left Handed Stroke for Right Handed" option, perhaps for certain types of calligraphy that demand a different angle of the brush, or simply to get a feel for how challenging traditional calligraphy have used to be for left-handed people.
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User Defined Brushes
Starting with TwoToJazz version 1.5, you can now define your own one-finger brushes! All it takes is drawing a simple object and adding it to the one-finger brush menu, from which you can then select any of your user defined brushes and draw with. You can use this feature to add texture to your drawings, and create a more painterly look, especially when using the Shadowed Strokes as well. The new user defined brushes are added to the existing "Advanced Edit and Animate Tools" In-App Purchase bundle. They are located on the right column of the one-finger brush menu. To add a new user defined brush, or replace an old one, follow these steps: (1) draw a simple object, (2) select the object, (3) open the one-finger brush menu and press +, (4) tap on a user-defined brush you'd like to replace; the brush is now added to your brush menu and you can select it at any time and draw with it. You can control the size of the brush with the slider, and change its color and opacity as usual. Please use this feature judiciously, as overuse of it in a given drawing can slow down edit/zoom/autosave actions that require redrawing of all of the objects at full resolution.
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Animation + Color or Gradient Variation
The ability to animate drawings has been a unique and prominent feature of TwoToJazz since its very first version. And now with version 1.7 of TwoToJazz five different modes of Animation are available to you: Jiggle, Dance, Animate, Scramble, and Colorize. The amount and randomness of movement is minimal in the Jiggle mode, and increases in each subsequent mode until it reaches total randomness in the Scramble mode. In the Colorize mode objects are static and may only change colors. Each of these animation modes can be combined with Color or Gradient Variations. The combination of animation and color variation modes are configurable using a picker wheel in the Settings menu.
Color Animation itself is another unique feature of TwoToJazz introduced in version 1.3. This feature is made available when both "Mix Color" and "Advanced Edit and Animate Tools" are unlocked. To enable Color Variations for a drawing, in Settings menu choose "+ Color" option for "Animation Mode". Now, during animation (which is activated/deactivated by the Animation button) objects change colors as they move or stay put--depending on the the Animation Mode. If you have replicated objects in your drawing, each replica will have its own color variations.
Gradient Color Animation, introduced in version 1.5 of TwoToJazz, renders objects of your drawing with gradient color variations. To enable Gradient Variation for a given drawing, in Settings menu choose the "+ Gradient" for "Animation Mode". Now during animation, objects in your drawing will be rendered with random gradient color variations. These gradients are more noticeable on objects whose original colors are non-primary colors (the primary colors are Red, Green, Blue).
Note that Gradient Colors work only with objects that are "filled" with color by TwoToJazz. For example, the two-finger calligraphy brush or the free-style brush create objects are filled with color. In contrast, there are other brushes in TwoToJazz that draw only lines, that could be thin or think, but have no filled area. Line-based objects do change colors during color animation, but with no gradient effect.
You can animate even your photos or non-TwoToJazz drawings in TwoToJazz! Simply import one as a background image, cut around objects in that image using TwoToJazz's scissors tool, and then start animation. You can cut pieces from multiple images, after making each the background image, create a collage work from all those cut-out pieces, and then animate the collage. However, color or gradient variations do not work with cut-out pieces, they work only with objects or brush strokes you have made in TwoToJazz.
While in Animation Mode, you can save snapshots of you animated and color variated work into your camera roll by pressing the Save button.
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HD Video Capture of Animation
Starting with version 1.7, TwoToJazz can automatically capture HD videos of your animated artwork and save them into your camera roll. Simply turn on "Save Animation Video" switch in the Settings. When you stop an animation, and to make sure its video capture completes, wait until the spinning wheel on the Animation button stops before switching to another application. Note that in general the more complex your drawing is the slower the animation will be, and certain settings like Shadowed Strokes, Gradient Variations, and/or Video Capture further reduce the speed of animation. However, the frame rate of the captured video is fixed. To make longer videos, let the animation run longer accordingly.
If you let your animation run for too long to generate enough frames, your iPad may fall asleep, and if that happens animation gets aborted. To keep your iPad awake without disturbing the animation, use the volume control every now and then!
TwoToJazz animation videos work very well with Facebook's video auto-play. Your animated artwork can be as short as just a few seconds and yet grab a lot more attention than a static image of your work. To preserve the HD quality of a captured video when sharing on Facebook, make sure in your iPad's Settings you have turned on "Upload HD" setting in Facebook/Settings, and upload the video to Facebook from within the Facebook App, rather than from iPad's Photos App. Otherwise, the best way to share your captured video on (any) social media is to transfer it to a computer and share it from there.
TwoToJazz animation videos are in landscape mode. For your portrait drawings, you can rotate the video using an app like "Rotate & Flip".
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TwoToJazz Animation + iTunes: A Personalized Music Visualizer
Version 1.7 of TwoToJazz literally brings Jazz to TwoToJazz, not only with its advanced animation and video capture options, but by letting you pick and play your favoriate music from your iTunes collection while watching your animated artwork. Simply turn on “Play iTunes Music” switch in the Settings for your drawing and now you get to pick a song to play from your iTunes collection when you animate your drawing.
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Animation and Memory Game
While animating, if you tap the screen not only the animation stops (may take some time if your drawing is too complex), but it also brings up a tiled memory game, where you need to find the matching tiles. When you tap on two tiles with the exact same image, you deactivate them. The game is finished once you've deactivated all matching tiles. Your score is shown on the middle tile. Try not to touch the score tile, or you'll pay a penalty!
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Organizing Your Art Work
To get to your collection of notebooks, press the Menu button and select the notebook icon. This will open your current notebook, where you can browse your other art. Press and hold your finger on any drawing and a menu with a number of options opens up. Using these options you can duplicate, copy, cut, delete, and share the selected drawing.
Duplicate will create an exact copy of your drawing in the same notebook. It is recommended that you periodically create duplicates of your important drawings, just to be safe in the very rare event that you may loose them.
Both Copy and Cut will add a copy of the selected drawing to the app's clipboard. You can then paste the drawing currently in the clipboard to another notebook. However, cutting a drawing will delete it from its notebook.
The Share option allows you to share the drawing with your friends via social media and email.
To add a new drawing to the current notebook, simply press the "+" button on the top left corner of your notebook area. A new drawing gets added to your notebook and automatically gets opened for editing.
To browse to other notebooks, press the "Library" button on the top right corner. In the Library area, press and hold your finger on any notebook to open a menu of options. These options allow you to edit the appearance of the notebook, or paste a drawing that you had previously copied/cut into the clipboard, or delete the notebook.
Using the edit option from the notebook menu, you can change the title of the notebook, and choose a picture from your photo Library as the cover of the notebook. You can adjust the picture by moving and/or zooming on it.
To add a new notebook, simply press the "+" button on the top left corner of the library screen. You get a chance to give your new notebook a name, and choose a cover picture for it too.
To open a notebook, simply tap on it. To open a drawing from a notebook, simply tap on it. It's that easy.
FAQ
TwoToJazz offers you in-app help. Simply press the menu icon at the right end of the toolbar, and then press the help button (the "?" icon). On the help page, you see a large box on the top/left corner of the page. This box is a mini version of your canvas that you can practice over by following the instructions shown in the box. There are rows of smaller boxes on the right and bottom sides of the practice box. Each row is associated with a bundle of related features. Each feature has a button that when pressed activates a practice session in the practice box. The help page also shows you which features are unlocked on your device. Remember: a pink bar under a bundle of features means they are locked, and and a blue bar means they are unlocked. To unlock a bundle of features, press the "Unlock" button on the bar below it, and make a corresponding in-app purchase. You also have the option to Unlock All TwoToJazz Features with a single in-App purchase.
If you need more general help, for example about what each button of the toolbar does, press the "More Help" button. Finally refer to the FAQ section below for further help.
Selecting Objects
Let's say you have pressed the "Select Button" and now are trying to select an object by tapping on it. If the object is too small, you may need to tap your finger on it more than once for it to precisely touch the object.
If your object is a very straight simple line, even an apparently very thick line, you may still need to tap more than once on it to select it. To get a bit technical here, to select a straight line, you need to tap a point on its spine! Things are much easier when your line has some curves in it. Try tapping inside a curvy part of simple lines to select them.
If you are trying to select one object and another one keeps getting selected, the reason is that the object that keeps getting selected was drawn later and is above the object you want. You can try tapping the object at a point that is clear from the obscuring object. If that's not working, temporarily move the wrong object away to get access to the right object, and then move the object you moved away back to its original place. If you have layers and layers of paint (e.g., using the smoky brush), then selecting the right stroke may not be practical. The rule of thumb, especially when painting using the smoky brush, is to make corrections as soon as possible, before adding other layers of paint on top of a potentially problem area.
Reordering Objects
Let's say you have two objects, but their order is not what you want. You want to move one above the other one. Presently, the only way that you can do this is to make a copy of the object that you want to move above the other one, and then delete the original copy. Notice that an object that you create using Copy is always on top of all other objects. To make sure the copy you are creating has the exact color of the original, make sure you sample the color of the original object first before making your copy. To do this, after you have selected the object open the palette tool and press the eye-drop icon.
Selecting the last object
If you want to select the last object that you have created, in order to move, copy, or delete it, or to change its color or pick its color, there is a faster way than going to select mode and tapping on the object. For this fast method to work, in the setting you need to set the value for "Delete with Confirmation" to "on" (which is the default value). Now from the draw mode, you can simply tap on the Delete button, and the last drawn object automatically gets selected for you. You can now perform any of the actions indicated above, and in particular, to delete the object you need to press the Delete button one more time. If Delete with Confirmation setting is off, pressing the Delete button will immediately delete the last object, and you won't get a chance to do anything else with it!
This method is particularly convenient when you are not happy with your last brush stroke, and you like to delete and redo it. By double tapping on the Delete button, the last object is deleted and you are back in draw mode. Remember that when you explicitly go to select mode by pressing the select button, you need to press the Draw button again to get back to draw mode. So, using this fast method can save you time. Yet, if you plan to delete not just the very last object, but a sequence of them, it would be faster if you first go to Select mode by pressing the Select button, and then press the X button as many time as needed to delete the series of objects, and at the end press the Draw button to get back to Draw mode.
If you mean to copy the last object, another fast way of selecting it is to press the Copy button. This will work even when you have turned off "Delete with Confirmation".
As a reminder, to deselect an object, simply press on the "Select" button.
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Zooming and Moving the Canvas
There are a couple of settings associated with zooming. The default mode allows you to zoom in/out fast. You will notice some pixelation during the zoom, but when you exit it things are sharp again. In this mode, if you have a background image, it will move or get smaller/bigger together with your drawing; that is your drawing is attached to your background.
The alternative mode is slower, especially if you have a complex drawing, but your drawing will stay sharp even during the zoom action. In this alternative mode, your drawing is detached from the background, and the background always stays in its default position. This mode is helpful if you want to adjust your whole drawing over a fixed background image.
To change this setting, open the settings menu and change the option under "Fast Canvas Move with Background".
If you switch from the fast/attached mode to the slow/detached mode, you will detach your background image from your drawing, and they will go out of sync. You can then adjust the drawing, and once you are satisfied you can lock them together again by switching to the fast/attached mode.
In fast/attached mode, if you change the background image, the new image will assume the position of the old image.
The other setting related to Zoom is the "Canvas Rotation" setting. When off, you only translate and scale when zooming. When on, you can also rotate your canvas.
TwoToJazz offers a theoretically infinite canvas for you, which is particularly useful for doing calligraphy. This also means that currently TwoToJazz does not provide a way to reset your canvas. That is, after you zoom in to do some detailed work, you need to manually zoom out to the scale and position of your choice.
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Color Mixing
Colors on a digital screen do not mix quite the way they mix on a real palette. When painting with real paint, the main colors are red, blue, and yellow. On a digital screen though, the main 3 colors are red, blue and green. And one key difference on a digital screen is that mixing blue and yellow does not create green! Blue and yellow are complementary colors on a digital screen, and mixing them creates gray. There are two other pairs of complimentary digital colors mixing of which creates gray. These pairs are cyan + red, and green + magenta. Mixing other major digital colors creates expected results: red + yellow = orange, red + blue = purple, and so on. And you can make any color darker or whiter by mixing in black or white respectively.
Since the main color green is provided on TwoTJazz's color palette, you don't really need to mix any colors to get green. Yet, you can mix green with any other color on TwoToJazz's main palette and get different types of green, except that remember mixing green with magenta gives you gray.
Practice mixing colors digitally on TwoToJazz's palette and soon you will become a pro.
Saving Your Work
TwoToJazz automatically saves your last open drawing when you open another drawing in your library. TwoToJazz also makes every attempt to automatically save your work when you close it, or when you switch to another application, or when your iPad goes to sleep. However, the more complex and rich your drawing is, and the more open applications you have on your iPad, the higher the chance that the process of automatically saving your work may not complete. For example, if you are switching to another application and it takes too long for TwoToJazz to automatically save your work because the work is complex, then TwoToJazz may get terminated by iOS before it has finished saving your work. That is why it is highly recommended that you manually and regularly save your work yourself, especially before switching to another application. To do that, press the 'Save' button and from the menu select 'Save Work'. We also recommend that you close applications that you are not actively using. That would provide more resources to TwoToJazz and other applications that you are actively using. To do that, double-click the home button of your iPad, scroll through your open applications and to close an application use three fingers to swipe it up and off the screen.
Using the Scissors Tool
With the scissors tool of TwoToJazz you can cut out shapes from background images, or from any part of your current drawing. Simply select the scissors tool from the Narrow-Brush menu, and with one finger/touch draw an outline around the area you want to cut. The outline will automatically get closed for you when you remove your finger. You will notice that once you finish drawing the outline and remove your finger from the surface of iPad, the outline disappears, and you may wonder where the cut-out is! It is still right where you cut it from! You can then Select the cut-out shape (e.g., by pressing the Select button and then tapping inside the shape you just cut out, or instead by pressing the X button), and move/resize/rotate and even copy the cut-out. Once you place a cut-out where you want to, and Deselect it (e.g., by pressing the Select button again), its outline disappears again. To create collages from your photos, simply choose the photo you want as your background and then cut out a shape using the scissors tool. Then move the cut-out shape out of the way, select a different photo as your background and cut out another shape, and repeat. Once you have created all your cut-outs, you can arrange them as you wish and perhaps over an image as your background. The scissors tool gives you a ton of possibilities for creating mixed media collages, photomontages, stickers, and much more.