Paint App - Becoming Bob Ross - This was the title of the Mintbean Hackathon I completed in November of 2021. As you can see, I took that very literally! When I first joined this hackathon I was a little apprehensive. I have only been coding for the past four months, but when I saw the inspiration, I knew right away that I had to try it out. I just watched a Netflix documentary about Bob Ross a few weeks ago, which gave me more appreciation for his work. I have also always enjoyed art and love to create things, and actually studied Art for my B.A..

The idea for combining the paint app idea with a search and find game came from another project I started working on just the weekend before the start of this hackathon. I had an idea to create a game app for my two and a half year old daughter. When we read together, she loves to find things in the drawings, so I wanted it to be something easy and fun for her to practice finding things. I also wanted it to have a feature where when each item is found, a different activity or game would pop-up. At first, I thought that these would be simple activities such as puzzles, and identifying shapes and numbers. However, after hearing our task for this project, I thought it would also be great to include a painting option! Even though I had already started on my "Search & Learn" app the weekend just before the start of this hackathon, I decided to start from scratch and channel my inner Bob Ross as much as possible for this "Search & PAINT" app. Time to look for cute icons of happy trees! 😊🌲

I'm pretty happy with my final MVP. It's interesting that the process of creating this app kind of reminded me of "zone" I get into when I paint or create art. I learned so much along the way, including how to work with the canvas element as well as many more CSS properties I hadn't used before and more practice with JS logic. Also, I learned there is so much more still to learn about the canvas API! While the final product only really works on desktops, my next steps are to continue learning more about touch events so I can make this work on tablets too (it somehow works on my phone...however it only allows me to draw dots). I think this idea can also be taken further, and made into an educational app about different artists, where each has a different page. Of course, once I have learned more backend development, I would like to add options to login and save the drawings as well.