If you dream of becoming the latest Picasso or fancy brushing up on your artistic skills, now’s your chance as the Nintendo DS Touch Screen transforms into your very own canvas. Art Academy: Learn painting and drawing techniques with step-by-step training launches across Europe on 6th August, giving both budding and experienced artists simple and creative tips and tricks to improve, enhance and even learn how to draw and paint.

Whatever your ability, you’ll find the step-by-step approach to lessons easy to follow. Art Academy offers lessons and art materials to get you started on your initial artistic journey, as well as contain more advanced art courses for those more adventurous artists, wanting to take their art to the next level.

The Touch Screen on the range of Nintendo DS consoles enables you to effortlessly paint or draw with realistically behaving paints and pencils. The pencils come in three different grades of lead; 2B, HB, 2H and also enable you to draw in soft or hard lines to blend and layer your pencil mark. Learn to use the eraser function to create interesting effects, such as mark marking and, of course, unlike with a real life painting, should you make any mistakes, it can easily be easily erased without wasting any paper. The paint function behaves similar to acrylic paint and the paintbrush set comes in three round or flat brushes allowing you to paint in thick or thin lines simply using your Nintendo DS stylus.

Ten set of paint tubes make up the game’s basic paint palette and there are 20 empty spaces for you to mix your own original colours. You can also control the amount of paint on your brush to give different effects such as dry brushing, and the level of brush wetness which will affect the transparency of paint to allow for a variety of painting effects in your artwork. Zoom in to your masterpieces to perfect the finer details close up and why not take advantage of the grid function, to help you achieve the right scale and proportions.

A helpful tutor, Vince, is also on-hand to show you how to use the art materials and what to draw, as well as teaching you art theory and techniques to explore independently. Some lessons are inspired by work from famous artists such as Albrecht Dürer (German), Paul Cézanne (French), Leonardo da Vinci (Italian), Jan van Huysum (Dutch), John Constable (English) and many more will get your creative juices flowing.

Use the Free Paint mode to allow you to freestyle your artwork, letting your imagination run wild and check out the material library for a wide range of stock images to get you inspired. If you are a Nintendo DSi or Nintendo DSi XL owner, why not also use your built-in camera to capture images and redraw them at leisure.  With such realistic artist training, you can use your Nintendo DSi & Nintendo DSi XL to help improve painting and drawing skills in real life!

So get ready for the art attack to start on 6th August when Art Academy: Learn painting and drawing techniques with step-by-step training comes to the Nintendo DS range of consoles