Waterlogue

INTRODUCING WATERLOGUE BY TINROCKET FOR WINDOWS 10

We are excited to announce that Waterlogue by Tinrocket is now available for download on Windows 10 devices.

Our first non-iOS release of Waterlogue includes all the styles, settings and fun of our original iOS app so you can create brilliant, beautiful watercolors with your Windows 10 device.

Whether you are taking a picture of the sunrise, a hike in the woods, or getting creative with selfies, see the world like an artist with Waterlogue for Windows 10. Your next masterpiece is only a tap away.

“We receive requests, daily, to bring Waterlogue to other platforms, so we’re really excited to have worked with Microsoft to make this release possible." - John Balestrieri, President, Tinrocket

Download Waterlogue by Tinrocket on your Windows 10 tablet, desktop or phone and start painting today. 

#WATERLOGUETAKEOVER: Heather Page

We met Heather how we meet a lot of people these days - on the internet. The gorgeous floral arrangements she shares on her Instagram feed caught our eye so much so that we asked her to be July’s Instagram Takeover artist. It was the highlight of our month to see her photographs through the eyes of Waterlogue.

A formally trained florist in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada, Heather shoots with either her iPhone or her dad’s vintage 35mm Pentax K1000. Although she says she’s not a photographer, her photos beg to differ.

“Waterlogue is such a fun way to extend the life of pretty perishables. There is a beautiful quote by Frida Kalho that says 'I paint flowers so they will not die.’ I think she sums it up perfectly." - Heather Page

For more of Heather’s takeover images, take a peek on Storehouse or Steller. Or on our Instagram feed.

For more of Heather’s work, you can find her on Tumblr and Instagram.

#Waterlogue #Watercolor #WaterlogueTakeover #Instagram #WaterlogueFlorals

#WATERLOGUETAKEOVER: Falling Off Bicycles

We've long admired Julia's, (Falling Off Bicycles), travel photography. 

Her photographs of Parisian cafés, the markets in Amsterdam, and quick jaunts to Rome and Marseilles (plus a very healthy dose of bicycles in whatever city her camera takes her to) are somehow both timeless and modern, and leave us pining for our next European vacation.   Earlier this month, we featured Julia as our Instagram Takeover Artist so we could all follow along on her adventures. We've gathered a few of paintings from the week. For more of Julia’s takeover images, take a peek at our story on Storehouse or Steller. Or follow along on Instagram. 

For more of Julia’s photography, follow her on Instagram or her website, Falling Off Bicycles.

#WATERLOGUETAKEOVER: Zeynep Albayrak

When we first discovered Zeynep, it was love at first sight. Although initially drawn to her vibrant still lifes of flowers and coffee, it was her use of color, composition and whimsy that held our attention, image after image. 

In April, we asked Zeynep to take over our Instagram feed. As our first Waterlogue Takeover artist, she brought life and sunshine and a hopeful outlook on spring - something our winter-weary souls desperately needed - into our feed.

For more of Zepnep’s takeover images, take a peek at our story on Storehouse. Or follow her on Instagram: @zynp.

#WATERLOGUEWANDERINGS IN AMSTERDAM: FEATURED ARTIST: DEEPAK GULATI

Much of the reward of creating Waterlogue is in meeting people who share their stories through the eyes of our app. Lucky for us, the thrill of discovering a beautiful Waterlogue, and the person and narrative behind it, happens every day.

Last week, we found Deepak Gulati’s blog, Sanctuary of Random Keystrokes, via Twitter, and it really struck a chord.

Says Deepak, of a recent, but brief, foray into painting with paintbrush and watercolors: “I was trying to create a literal copy of what I saw in watercolor. I should’ve tried to capture only the essence. Like the way the world appears to me without my glasses.”

Frustrated with his paintings, he discovered Waterlogue.“There is something about photos of cities in Europe, particularly Amsterdam, that causes Waterlogue to bring out the sublime.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Through Waterlogue, Deepak highlights Amsterdam’s gorgeous architecture, the beauty of its canals and the ubiquity and simplicity of traveling on two wheels through the city. We hope you enjoy his wonderful travelogue of Amsterdam as much as we do.

For more of Deepak’s Waterlogues of Amsterdam, please see our story on Storehouse. And be sure to visit his blog, for more of his wonderful photography and travels.

THE MEREDITH VIEIRA SHOW: SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW

We were pretty excited for Waterlogue’s feature on the Meredith Vieira Show today.

Liz from coolmomtech.com demoed the app for us and presented Meredith with this adorable Waterlogue of her kids.

Watch below:

CAMERA SHY

Even though we don't see the faces in these nine selfies, we still feel connected to each of the subjects. A favorite striped shirt, a casual bun, a serious stance, the light of day - each of these details catches our eye, tells just the hint of a story and leaves the rest to our imagination.

We've collected some of our favorites, found on our #Waterlogue travels on Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest.

Row 1: Karen Woodard / VB Photos, Cuckoo 4 Design, Pontoons and Pulitzer Row 2: Waterlogue, Karen Woodard / VB Photos, Southern Living, City Love Row 3: Charla Yvonne, Winter Rose 121, Cuckoo 4 Design

Congratulations and thank you for sharing!

START SOMETHING NEW

This month, as part of Apple's Start Something New campaign, we partnered with trans-continental artist duo Craig and Karl to create the larger-than-life Waterlogue image that is currently on display in Apple Stores around the world.

Tomorrow, Thursday January 29, we close out the month with an event at the SOHO Apple Store. Artist, Craig Redman, will talk about the creative process of collaboration, followed by John Balestrieri, creator of Waterlogue, who will demo the app's features, while sharing pro-tips so you can also #Waterlogue like a pro.

Tickets are free. Please join us and reserve here. 

SIMPLE THINGS

Sometimes it takes a new year and its promise of a clean slate, to draw us back to the beauty of simplicity. And so, today, we’re celebrating some of our favorite simple moments created with Waterlogue on Instagram, Steller and Pinterest.

We love the thoughtful composition of these images and the simple pleasures they evoke and hope you do, too.

Happy new year!

Row 1: Avraham Zohari, Il Castello di Zucchero, Waterlogue Row 2: Number 7 Cloud, Larissa Gallandi, Christina Pobke Row 3: Holly Dresher, Jordan Foy, Elisenda Llinares

Congratulations and thank you for sharing! 

SNOW DAYS

We've gathered some of our favorite snowy scenes from Instagram and Pinterest. Congratulations and thank you for sharing!

Row 1: PennyGram, Firery Broome, Lisa Kadow Row 2: Kimitake Hiraoka, Terry Bain, Alicia Slough,  Row 3: Catskill Tracks, Lisa Kadow, jokakaku-waterlogue

Since launching Waterlogue in December 2013, we've gotten a whale-sized number of very passionate requests for an Android version of the app. We are sincerely thrilled that so many people would like to use Waterlogue on Android devices. If we could realistically make and adequately support an Android version, we absolutely would. But, alas, we can't.

So many Android users have voiced disappointment at the iOS-only status of Waterlogue that we thought we would explain a little bit about what it means for a small, independent iOS developer to expand to Android, and why these obstacles make doing so prohibitive for us at the present time.

First, some background: Waterlogue was developed by two senior iOS developers (we have well over 15 years experience developing for Apple systems between us). It took over a year of (unpaid) work to make it. During that time, we both took a large financial risk, and made equally large investments of time and intellectual capital, in order to develop Waterlogue.

Here are the reasons why for us, at this time, it's not realistic to develop an Android version of the Waterlogue app:

We are iOS experts. Neither of us knows much about Android, so we'd need to devote several months to learning the ins and outs of a new OS before we could even begin to develop the actual app. We don't have anything against Android, we just don't know the platform.

We would want to do it right. Android is sufficiently different from iOS that making an Android version would mean essentially starting from scratch. So, we would need to re-write the app from the ground up in order to make sure it works the same way and provides the same quality output for Android devices. As mentioned above, it took us a year to write Waterlogue for a platform we know very, very well; we believe it would take longer to develop a version of Waterlogue that would perform to our standards on Android.

We are committed to ensuring a stable, well-designed, and extremely high-quality user experience. The computation required by Waterlogue is on the very edge of what is possible with current devices. It takes a lot of care to ensure that the app runs well on the relatively small number of Apple devices that are in common use. Android is a much more fragmented situation, with several forks of the OS and a large number of devices all with different screen sizes and capabilities. Making sure that Waterlogue ran reliably on all of these devices is just not possible for us to do at this time.

We are 100% committed to supporting the apps we make. While ultimately the user experience might feel the same between the iOS version and any Android version we'd develop, practically speaking if we were to launch an Android version we would be supporting, maintaining, and updating two entirely separate apps. Given that we're at our limits with supporting the iOS version of the app, we know that we can't realistically sustain the extra work that an Android version would require.

Thank you, Android users, for being so passionate about and so interested in Waterlogue.  We hope you can understand where we're coming from. Rest assured that if we ever are able to expand Waterlogue to Android, we'll make it a great app!

Ciaran Blumenfeld, of Momfluential and When We Were There, talks about the evocative nature of watercolor and its role in storytelling. 

The Difference Between Documenting and Storytelling

I was recently sitting in the new Starbucks Café in Downtown Disney.

There’s a large-screen LCD in there, upon which they display scenes from their coffee plantations in Costa Rica. They are not merely documenting the process. They are “telling the story” of the beans. The PR firm at the opening was careful in her choice of words. Everything about this new location is about story. Fitting for Disney.

The images on the screen are not flat photographs. They are watercolors images.

It struck home again why, and how much, I love Waterlogue.

When I think of my favorite children’s books and illustrations, I think watercolors.

Photographs are fantastic for documentation. They can be very artistic and evocative. Photographs are art.

But paintings tell a story. It’s in the bleed of a color, the blur of a background, the subtle dissolve of details that force your imagination to work harder. Paintings make you flex your story muscles as your mind fills in the details.

This is what I love about Waterlogue. My favorite images now have two lives. Their first life, a moment in time captured, their second life, an illustration that begs for a compelling narrative.

Consider the difference between these two versions of a photo I shot while strolling in Laguna Beach. Which one would you want on a postcard sent to you. Which one begs the story of how we got there and what we did.  Which one sits with you a little longer?

To me the watercolor is more evocative. I want to retire in that watercolor.

Leave it to Disney and Starbucks to confirm what I’ve already instinctively known since childhood. Watercolors are better for telling a story. I’m so grateful for Waterlogue for creating an app that converts my photos so quickly, easily, and convincingly into storytelling illustrations. I never dreamed it could be this easy for me to story tell with images, as I have always done with words.

AN ILLUSTRATED JOURNEY

The artist’s journal is a major inspiration for Waterlogue.

One of our favorite books, An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration from the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators, and Designers by Danny Gregory, has a delightful range of examples of how artists use their journals when they are traveling. Through reproductions of actual pages from the journals of the 30 artists included in the book, An Illustrated Journey is a great way to get inspired—each approach is so different and personal, from medium used to level of detail, to what the artist pays attention to in the environment and on the page.

Short personal essays from each artist give details about how each one thinks about traveling and the artist's journal: why and how they do it, and what they get out of the process of sketching in new (or at least not just not the same old) places.

Flipping through the book, it's great to see the sheer range of approaches taken by the artists towards their subjects and locations. Check it out—and let us know if it gives you any ideas for how to use Waterlogue to document your own journeys!

In our first blog post, we talked about how artists’ journals were a big inspiration for Waterlogue. While looking at this body of work, we were very excited to discover how traveling artists made customized, pocket-sized watercolor palettes out of repurposed Altoids mint tins:

(Image by Flickr user Melanie Narish, used with permission.)

If you do a search for them online, you’ll see the level of personalization that can go into these entirely customizable and eminently portable watercolor sets.

Here is one made from a vintage German cigarette tin that also includes a few small, useful tools:

(Image by Flickr user paperboatcaptain, used with permission.)

Nifty, right?

We want Waterlogue to serve as your portable watercolor kit—always at the ready whenever you want to capture something in a delightfully watery way.

Using Waterlogue: Pulp Illustrations with Toys

Waterlogue is great when you want a speedy way to remove the “photograph” from a photograph. With just a couple taps, you can change the fundamental nature of an image, opening up a bunch of different imaginative directions. It’s fun, fast, and often improves the creative possibilities of a quickly snapped photo.

Here’s how I used Waterlogue for a series of pulp-inspired images:

First, I posed plastic toys against colored paper backgrounds and then captured the scenes with an iPhone 5s. I didn’t use any elaborate lighting, lenses, or staging, and each initial image only took a few minutes to shoot.

 Original image of cowboys ready for a showdown.

Because I wanted the images to ultimately have the feel of illustrations, I first fed them into Waterlogue, which gave me a variety of non-photographic looks to work with. With some of the images, I applied a post effect in another iOS app, like Instagram or Afterlight.

In the image above, I erased the figures’ bases and replaced them with the ground paper texture using TouchRetouch for iOS.

 Something dramatic is happening…in space.

The blue and purple glows are light leak effects, added with Afterlight for iOS.

Here’s the actual set-up for this image. The hardest part was not accidentally knocking the figures over.

 Lunar landscaping is easy with crumpled paper.

Finally, here are a few other images from my Waterlogue session: