With the delayed release of Flipnote Studio 3D - now finally confirmed as a Club Nintendo farewell freebie - there have been other drawing apps for creative gamers to try their hand at, such as Colors! 3D, Comic Workshop and Nintendo's own Art Academy series. Square One Games' Scarygirl Illustration Kit, a vector drawing program, is decidedly more limited than these more robust apps available from the Nintendo eShop, but rather than simplify the process it feels less intuitive and clunkier than it should. While there's a fair amount of charm in its presentation, Scarygirl Illustration Kit is not likely to be the next big art program on the 3DS.

Scarygirl Illustration Kit is branded with the characters from the 2012 platformer ScaryGirl, which has a lovely art style and a clean pop-art aesthetic by Nathan Jurevicius. Using the touch screen users can craft vector drawings and animate them; vector drawings, as the floating rabbit in the tutorial explains, keep their sharpness and shape when resized, rotated and moved. The options are very basic - using the stylus, users can draw lines, circles and curved lines to create an illustration. The ScaryGirl characters are used as examples in the helpful tutorial mode, which users are encouraged to consult if they're not familiar with drawing software. To animate an illustration there are limited options for choosing the speed of each frame, and frames can be copied and pasted - this is not nearly as flexible as Flipnote Studio, and the creative possibilities seem more restricted with the few options available, such as filling a closed vector with colour. For the non-artists (like this reviewer), there are pre-made ScaryGirl characters that can be imported into an illustration.

The interface seems simple, but choosing an option almost always brings up another screen that takes you away from your drawing. There's no long wait when this happens, but it's frustrating to keep having to confirm and click through options over and over again. Selecting different objects also proved to be unintuitive, as we had difficulty colouring in specific closed circles and rectangles when trying to create our masterpiece. Animating was easy enough, but annoyingly the software needs to generate the movie every time you want to play what you have so far, and it's not nearly as quick as it should be considering the small amount of detail and resources being used.

Sharing your creations, like much of the interface, isn't intuitive at all. Projects can only be saved to the SD card with no online integration or easy sharing options; it takes a long time to export files to the SD card, which is unacceptable given the simplicity of the assets. It took several minutes for the software to finish exporting a single-frame image, which made us think the software had frozen.


ScaryGirl Illustration Kit isn't a great drawing app, and the charm found in its presentation can only take it so far. There are far better options on the eShop for users looking to use the 3DS as a drawing tool, and we'd easily recommend those over this one. Fans of the ScaryGirl character may like being able to import pre-made characters, but other than that we suggest sticking with software that's more robust.