Price: $4.99    Score: 10/10    By Michael Essany

KiwiPixel’s new app, Inspire, takes the fun and ease-of-use native to basic painting apps and adds the professional look, feel, and functionality that you would never expect from an application that remains so simple and enjoyable to use.

As one who never graduated to an artistic sophistication beyond watercolor painting in kindergarten, I immediately found myself utterly enamored with the very activity I had long shunned as a result of my sorely lacking artistic talents. Although I still possess no legitimate skill as an artist, Inspire has a way of inspiring one’s artistic imagination more than your standard, run of the mill desktop or mobile painting tool ever could.

In other words, when KiwiPixel promised a professional-style application, they didn’t fail to deliver.

Hands-down, Inspire is the most addictive and fun painting app available for the iPhone, largely because of its ability to simulate wet paint on a canvas, which can then be blended and twirled into an array of stunning effects courtesy of four different brush types: flat brush, round brush, fan brush and palette knife.

Despite a somewhat hefty price tag of $4.99, a host of neat features makes the expense worth it. They include:

• Each brush comes in many different sizes to allow large, sweeping strokes as well as fine, precise strokes.
• Brushes can be loaded with different amounts of paint, including no paint at all for a dry brush.
• Varying amounts of pressure can be used with a dry brush to achieve many different kinds of blending effects.
• Brushes can be rotated a full 360 degrees to allow a variety of different strokes.
• 200 levels of undo and redo are available.
• Choose any paint color quickly and easily with the natural color picker.
• The eyedropper tool can be used to select paint colors that are already on the canvas.
• Save up to 25 paintings in your gallery and easily export any painting to your Photos.

If you spring for the app, be sure to read the tips & tricks section or you may fail to realize just how much this application can really do.

One of the coolest painting apps ever devised, Inspire just might inspire the artist you never knew existed within you.

Inspire requires the iPhone OS 3.1 or later and is compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch.