Faces iMake Is All Of The Fun With None Of The Cleanup

At some point in your life you’ve probably been an impromptu artist with the leftovers on your plate, or a stack of coins on your counter top, or even the random office supplies on your desk. Creating a funny faces out of ordinary objects just seems to be something that us humans have a innate tendency to do and Faces iMake, by iMagine machine, allows you to exactly that…create faces from every day stuff.

Developed in conjunction with internationally renowned author and illustrator Hanoch Piven, Faces iMake provides you with a huge selection of random objects, the canvas and tools with which to create your masterpiece. There are 20 different face shapes, and the sheer number of objects available (over 200) to select from is astonishing. They are broken down into categories including food, toys, kitchen, tools, school, buttons, and letters. From fruits and vegetables, hammers and nails, rulers and legos, Faces iMake is sure to have a medium to fit your mood.

The objects are photo-quality reproductions of the real things and greatly add to the immersion and realism of the experience that this “game” aims to recreate. Creating a work of art is as easy as selecting objects and dragging them where you want them A recently updated rotation tool makes orienting the objects as simple as selecting them and dragging your finger around it to rotate. You can move and delete objects at any time, you have the ability to raise and lower objects on layers to make them more or less visible and there is even an undo/redo button. Once you are done with your artwork, you can share your artwork via either Facebook or email, save it to your iPhone album or assign it to a phone contact.

One of the features that I initially really wished I had was the ability to resize the objects, as some were a bit larger than I wanted, but the developer made me aware that this was actually a conscious to try to add to the realism of the App. Piven had the following to say on the matter, “I wanted Faces iMake to be a virtual workshop with me and reflect what happens in the real world when you work with objects. Therefore you can rotate and move objects around but you cannot resize them. This limitation which might seem annoying at first makes you become more resourceful and creative. The idea is to play and to play some more. All great art is born from playing. Therefore Faces iMake is a game as much as it is an art workshop.” This seems to make sense, so I’m warming up to the idea of no sizing tool.

One really nice feature of the app which I have not mentioned yet, are the six short, entertaining tutorial videos that help introduce you to the tools and how the interface works. They give you a nice overview of the interface itself as well as give you an idea of the breadth of creations you can make with the tool. You’ll quickly discover that you are only limited by your own imagination and faces are not the only thing you can make. Many of these videos actually use real physical objects allowing you to get an idea of exactly how much this really looks like the real deal!

I spent half my Junior year of college abroad in St. Andrews, Scotland, and just about every night when I finished dinner I’d take my leftovers (usually the veggies) and as my dorm-mates watched on, I’d craft up some sort of crazy face that (at least I hoped) would entertain the poor folks tasked with doing the dishes in the kitchen. Now that I’ve gotten a bit older, this kind of behavior is a bit frowned upon, so its great to have this socially acceptable outlet (without the mess). My three year-old daughter also had a chance to play with Faces iMake as well. She enjoyed it and laughed at the funny faces that we created together, but she did struggle with the controls a bit, so she’s not quite ready to handle it on her own just yet. Perhaps with a bit more practice she’ll be out-crafting her dad. I should mention that I did experience a fair bit of crashing with the previous release, but since the recent update, things seem to be much more stable.

In Conclusion

Faces iMake is an excellent vehicle to stimulate your artistic creativity and is a great distraction for yourself or a fun activity you can play together with your kids. It’s a faithful reproduction real thing, which is sure to provide hours of entertainment without the messy cleanup. At just 99¢, it’ll even cost you less than buying all the objects you’d need to do it in real life. 😉