Disney Art Academy Review

Nintendo’s Art Academy series has been somewhat of a quiet achiever. While the idea of drawing on your Nintendo 3DS might seem a little odd, there’s actually something quite good here. Despite the technical shortcomings of the system, Disney Art Academy offers some great tools and can even teach you how to draw.

Disney Art Academy starts off a bit tutorial heavy, but it’s kind of needed to get your head around just how you’re going to draw on your Nintendo 3DS. Eventually the game will let you go off and draw whatever you want but you’ll want to pay attention during the lessons to get the hang of things.

The lessons aren’t just about how to use the application. In fact, the game actually has a story of sorts during the lessons. You go on ‘Drawing Camp’ and the councillor there will run you through the lessons. You’re joined by a couple of friends from the camp who, frankly, are pretty terrible at drawing.

Each of the lessons in the game is fairly dialogue heavy – there’s a ton of back and forth between all the characters before you start each lesson and at the end. There’s actually quite a lot of text that takes a while to read and, for a child, it could even be a little annoying (especially since you can’t skip it at all). You’ll also need to sit through all of these lessons to unlock everything in the free paint mode.

Once you do work your way through a lesson, you’ll unlock new drawings in the game’s ‘Free Paint’ mode. You can use these new drawings as a template to base your own drawing off. You obviously use the bottom screen to draw on, but the bottom one can be your reference screen so you don’t have to keep flicking the design on and off.  You can of course draw anything you like at any point, but the lessons you learn will help you redraw the provided artworks. There are over 80 provided drawings for you to check out and they range from classic Disney characters like Mickey, Donald Duck, Winnie the Pooh and The Little Mermaid as well as Pixar characters like Woody, Mike Wazowski and of course Elsa from Frozen.

Drawing on the bottom screen is fine. Playing on the New 3DS, the smaller screen wasn’t a problem but I did find myself having to zoom in to get the detail I wanted to match the source drawings. It’s nothing like my giant iPad Pro, on which I can do minute detail without zooming. Not that I can draw anything particularly well, but after playing this game for a while I have learned a couple of things.

Your creations aren’t locked away in your Nintendo 3DS forever either. Thanks to Miiverse, you can upload your drawings for the entire world to see, if you want to. You can also export your photos to the SD card of your Nintendo 3DS. This might be a little harder on the new models since you have to unscrew the back, but its the best way to copy the raw files from the system. We’re sure kids won’t mind a little JPG compression. There’s another way to share in the game, too. You can share lessons to other Nintendo 3DS owners, even if they don’t have the game. Lessons can be shared via ‘Download Play’, so you could even have a draw off with a friend and see who has the better drawing skills.

While it might seem odd to want to draw on the Nintendo 3DS and its old hardware, the final drawings still end up looking great. The game’s lessons allow you to not only to learn how to use the game but also learn some concepts around drawing and being an artist. The only real problem with the game is the annoying tutorials which at times just drag on and on.  The ability to share the art you create and share the lessons also makes the game social, both online and locally with friends.

Disney Art Academy is a fun, new way to explore your creativity and even if you can’t draw, you can definitely draw better than the kids in the game! So don’t feel too bad.