Scan & Draw: Color-Mixing Pen Can Make 16 Million Hues & Shades

A new pen aims to take art to the next level, letting users scan colors from their surroundings and deploy them, all via a single gadget. The Cronzy can be employed to scan plants, walls, cloth, and other surfaces; a connected app can then save, collect and use these colors on the go.

color draw pen

The scan-and-draw concept has been around for years, but getting this versatility and complexity into a single small and portable device has been a challenge. Some tools on the market can deploy present mixes and others can scan natural and built environments. This one taps your smartphone’s computing power to speed up and scanning and combines it with a cartridge-enabled drawing device.

The scanned colors, tints and shades are converted into CYMK (matching the swappable cartridges) or RGB formats so they can be deconstructed, remixed or adjusted according to an artist’s whim on a connected device. The gadgets comes with a portable case and charger and works with Android, IOS and Windows phones.

color draw app

Naturally, they can be shared with other users as well this way, allowing people to create and distribute custom palettes for further use. For now, the device is in crowdfunding, but its makers aim to have a consumer model on the market by early 2017. If the prototypes are any indicator, this could be the best one-stop digital-plus-physical drawing tool to date.