Paint Me a Butterfly (iOs) Review

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” John Keats

Few would argue the sheer beauty of the butterfly. Their tiny, delicate wings hold a rainbow of colors amongst the species, and their short life spans seem a constant metaphor for the fleeting beauty that is life. To a child, though, the beauty of a butterfly holds no inner meaning beyond the delight of their fluttering wings and multitude of colors. Pixel Punch’s newest app, Paint Me a Butterfly, blends the calming beauty of butterflies with controls aimed at being simple enough for a child to understand, in the hope of creating “an environment where children or adults are inspired to produce
something they can do with ease and proudly share with others.”

As you open Paint Me a Butterfly, you are treated to the vibrant colors of a butterfly sitting upon a branch, as the calming sounds of nature fill the air. Birds tweet, crickets chirp, and it puts you immediately in mind of sitting in a country garden. In the garden, a variety of butterflies sit upon a tree (nine of them per page, two pages in total – although they are not all unique in design). When you begin the game, all of the butterflies are black and white. As you color in each of them, the butterflies in the garden will showcase your designs until you have colored them all in. You can go back and edit your designs, or even completely erase them, whenever you like.

To color in a butterfly, simply select one from the tree. You are then taken to the creator page, where you can give the butterfly its signature colors. You have a couple of different tools available to you to make this happen. On the left side of the page, you’ll find two circles. The top one, when tapped, brings up options for coloring and erasing the colors on the wings, coloring and erasing the wing design colors, and a drop which fades or even erases the colors. The bottom circle is the color selection, which offers a range of circles in purple, red, orange, yellow, green, and blue (for wing color), and a slider that allows you to change the size of your brush. That is the extent of the control you have over your brush – color and size. As you begin to color in the butterflies wings, you’ll notice two things right away. You can’t go out of the lines, and if you color something on one side, it appears symmetrically on the other. This is a nice touch for younger users as it ensures they’ll have a perfect butterfly every time, but it would be nice to have the option to turn that off for older or more adventurous users.

The wing design colors offer a smaller selection, and I was disappointed to find that you don’t actual have the power to draw the design yourself. Rather, you can deepen the design that is already there, all around or in parts, and you can change the color – but only one color is allowed in the designs. Once you have finished your design, you can click the camera icon in the bottom right corner to take a photo and add it to the gallery. The gallery has pages of user created butterflies, which can be voted on by giving a heart to the ones you like best. Then, you can go back to your garden to check out how your finished butterfly looks with his buddies, and select another one to do it all again.

Pixel Punch takes the idea of their controls being simple seriously enough that they haven’t provided any sort of tutorial or instruction text at all in game. While the controls end up simple enough for an adult to figure out, little things like how the wing design pencil works, or how to fade a color, or even what to do with the gallery could have been included in a small tutorial page for those who like clear instructions. I had three different kids try it out cold (with no instruction from me unless requested). While the seven year old mostly figured it out on her own, the five year old was quickly frustrated, and even the nine year old needed some help before he really understood it. As these are kids who happily play a number of art and coloring games, it speaks to the intuitiveness of the controls, which could have perhaps been a bit easier to understand.

Paint Me a Butterfly is a very simple app that tries to be both easy enough for kids to understand, yet enjoyable for the adults in their life as well. While it offers some absolutely beautiful visuals, it suffers somewhat from a lack of direction. The controls aren’t all that intuitive for younger children, and older kids and adults will soon find that there really isn’t enough to the game to keep their interest for long. Still, it offers a unique way to foster interest in the arts, particularly in butterfly fanatics, even if that comes with a bit of a learning curve for the younger set.