Art For App Sake

It’s difficult being a mature gamer, and by mature I mean being just shy of 40 years old, or indeed any of us in our older years. All you youngsters have no idea how lucky you are to stay at home with the parents or flatmates and be able to put up posters of your favourite games or bands or movies. Indeed, my bedroom in my youth was a shrine to all the bands I was listening to, with a smattering of game posters. Strangely though, with age, posters become something completely redundant as a means of showing off things you are passionate about. There comes a point where, when looking at a picture or poster, your thoughts turn to how they may look… in a frame!

The frame still doesn’t completely fulfil the ability to tastefully display game related posters though. The subject matter has a huge part to play in the whole scheme of things. For example, putting the box art of say, Modern Warfare 2 into a frame is simply a bit, well, twee. This age thing demands that anything that goes into a frame is deserved of being in a frame. The contents of said frame have to be both striking and at the same time eye catching without appearing like an advertising hoarding. Alas, I’ve never been able to find anything that ticks all the boxes of game-worthy framing until I stumbled upon a fantastic app on the App Store. The greatest photo changing app in the world ever goes under the name of “Wordfoto”. Wordfoto allows you to take any image stored in your camera roll or taken with the camera and turn it into a word filled piece of art. You can choose any words you want which are then used to fill in your entire picture with the chosen words. The results are stunning.

Now I can have tasteful game related artwork adorning the walls, in frames, in my house and I will never feel that it looks like a teenager’s bedroom. It really makes me wonder though as to why no one has come up with more framed game artwork to cater for an older audience. The average age of a gamer these days is somewhere in their thirties and we’re not going to get any younger. Of course simply having the ability to create stunning pieces of artwork doesn’t necessarily guarantee that your other half, if you have one, will be willing to allow you to adorn their walls with such imagery. Luckily I also discovered that by using normal, carefully selected pictures of real life things that you can actually get just as stunning results, as my next picture demonstrates. This is a picture of clouds and the sun I took last year and with a quick bit of Wordfoto magic, blam! High art.

Of course, another problem when putting posters into frames is that they are usually huge prints. Frames for prints that size would be a small fortune, so unless it is something that you are sure you want to spend lots on it can be a bit of a waste of money. The good thing is the images that you make with Wordfoto can be any size you choose. You could have one large frame filled with lots of smaller images or several medium sized frames with a different picture in each. I’ve also noticed that there are more and more places offering to put your images onto a canvas backing making it look even more arty. I really like the sound of something like that, alas it seems to cost in the region of around £40-£50 per image. Of course, if you do buy any other kind of art to hang in your house it could be dearer than that so why not spend the money on something you actually love? I’ve been using Wordfoto to customise all kinds of pictures, not just games ones. I find it’s a great app for sending pictures to people that show a little effort has gone into the picture you are sending, it looks like you have spent way more time creating the images than the minute or so it takes from start to finish. I’d love to waffle on about the capabilities but instead I urge you to try it for yourselves and I’d like you to look at a few other images I created. Enjoy.