May the 4th be with you!

If you follow Brush Ninja on Instagram then you may have noticed I like to make animations for things like Star Wars Day, and Mario Day, and Pokemon Day. I’m a geek through and through, but also it’s something to have fun with. I made Brush Ninja so that I could make animations, and I enjoy making animations about the things I enjoy.

Anyway - I also worked on a few other things last month.

Animation Maker

The Brush Ninja animation maker had a whole bunch of smaller fixes but the biggest change was the addition of the Merge button in the select tool.

Last month I talked about optimising the app, and this is an extension of that, it helps to make Brush Ninja run faster when you have a lot of groups in your animation.

Merge is an alternative to group. Merge converts the selected shapes into a single bitmap. Unlike group it is not reversible, you can’t unmerge the shapes, and since it’s a bitmap it will become blurry/ pixelly if you enlarge it. However, if you are getting a lot of slowdown in your animation, and you use group a lot, then it would be worth merging instead of grouping. Brush Ninja will then be a lot more responsive!

## Art Ninja

Art Ninja has also seen some updates, and now features an improved toolbar that allows you to pick any drawing colour, and not be restricted to the limited colour palette.

I’ve also been working on the embedding option, and websites can now embed Art Ninja on their websites! There’s documentation for this here:

You can see an example of Art Ninja being embedded on my printable puzzles website, Ninja Puzzles, in these colouring pages.

Social Media and Marketting

I am not very good at marketing Brush Ninja. It’s not something I enjoy, I just want to build stuff, and so my wife has said she will help. She’s not a marketter (she’s actually a scientist), but she likes a challenge and so hopefully between us we will revive the Brush Ninja Instagram and Facebook pages, and maybe make new Youtube videos more frequently.

I Love Hearing From You!

Your feedback is invaluable to me. Have ideas on how Brush Ninja can improve? Facing issues with any of the tools? Or maybe you just want to share your coolest animations? Don’t hesitate to hit reply and let me know!

Explore More

In case you missed it, check out the Brush Ninja Gallery for inspiration, or dive into our Help Section for tips on getting the most out of Brush Ninja.

Stay Creative!

Thank you for being a part of the Brush Ninja community. Keep creating, keep sharing, and most importantly, keep having fun!

May the creativity be with you,

Ben

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