New Art Academy Review

It’s interesting that Nintendo has opted to launch the 3DS XL with two titles aimed at those with a creative bent. In the case of New Art Academy, there’s a fairly obvious logic behind it, as the expanded screens naturally offer a grander canvas on which to sketch or paint your own miniature masterpiece. Consider, too, that the original DS title sold half a million copies in the UK alone – following its debut in two parts on the DSiWare service - and you can imagine this being something of a system-seller for a certain audience. As with the first title, New Art Academy is an accomplished and genuinely educational package that’s just missing one or two features which could have made it even better.

The lessons are genuinely useful, and there’s even some light art history thrown in to increase its educational value.

Your host, once again, is the genial Vince, a bearded artist whose demeanour is more Bob Ross than his ear-slicing namesake. Fittingly for this 3D update, he’s filled out a little – once a cartoonish sketch, now he more closely resembles an Aardman Animations character (he has a pet dog, too, though the sleepy Bacon is no Gromit). He’ll happily talk you through the basics of composition in a series of step-by-step lessons that take in still life, portraiture, landscapes, architecture and more.

You’ll learn how to build up paintings by blocking out colour before adding highlights and detail, and expand simplistic line drawings into something much more solid with light, shade and hatching to suggest form and texture. Later you’ll be taught about paint mixing and the art of atmospheric perspective – and that’s just in the introductory course. Another set of lessons examines more advanced techniques, and there are bonus mini-lessons that expand upon what you’ve just learned, with Vince offering only brief guidelines before leaving you to get on with it.

The lessons are genuinely useful, and there’s even some light art history thrown in to increase its educational value. With pastels and pencil crayons, you have a broader palette to choose from, and it’s no longer as restrictive about mixing media – though if you do choose to revert to pencils from watercolours to add fine detail, for example, your work so far will be locked in place. Meanwhile, the user interface is more intuitive than the previous game, and the increased resolution helps you produce pictures with slightly finer detail than before. It doesn’t compare to a Wacom tablet, of course, but then it isn’t really meant to: this is a program designed to teach skills that can be transferred to a real canvas.

Perhaps that’s why, unlike the excellent eShop title Colors 3D, you can’t create 3D paintings. It’s still a pity, though, particularly given the beautiful stereoscopic images that serve as your inspiration. It also lacks the incredible feature set offered by its downloadable rival, with no way of undoing mistakes unless you start from the beginning of the step or manually erase them. Another bizarre quirk means you can’t save your image to an SD card once you’ve chosen to end a lesson. Save it to your portfolio and you can hang it a virtual gallery or share it via SpotPass, but there’s no other way to transfer it.