Graffiti – contemporary art form or simple vandalism? With Spray Painter, a mobile app for Nokia touchscreen devices, you won’t have to decide.

Spray Painter is a fun mobile painting app for your Nokia Symbian OS, S60 5.0 (touchscreen) device that lets you ‘tag’ your device’s screen with graffiti, then save your work. While creating your mobile graffiti, you can choose among several background textures and colours, spray-paint colours, and spray-paint weights or thicknesses.

Launch the Spray Painter app on your Nokia device, and you are presented with that tabula rasa of graffitidom, a tall, clean brick wall (Spray Painter works only in portrait mode). Am I a superannuated adolescent, or is this wall just begging for defacement?

The user interface is simple. A few controls are arranged along the screen’s bottom edge. Starting from the left, the white spray icon lets you control the thickness or weight of your line. You have three options: thick/heavy, medium, and thin/light.

Immediately to the right, the next command is the spray-paint icon. Tap it to select your paint colours. Here you have eight options, including yellow, green, blue, and red.

Next to the right, the Undo command erases the last line you painted. Once tapped, the command changes to Redo, and the two commands toggle. Tapping Redo undoes the Undo command, restoring the painted line you just erased — and vice versa.

The Menu command brings you to several options: Change background, clear image, save image, help, about, and exit. Change background lets you do just that, selecting from four brick patterns – or no pattern at all:

You can also change the colour of the bricks. However – and this was confusing – I could only get to the Background Colour menu by first selecting Clear Image:

That glitch aside, Spray Painter offers you a large number of options. You can mix and match background colours, brick textures, paint colours, and paint widths. And there are some cool sound effects – mainly the whooshing sound of the spray-paint can as you paint on the screen. I’m no artist, but here’s an example of the kind of lurid effect I was easily able to achieve:

If you like your handiwork, the Save command in the Menu lets you store your image as a PDF file on your device. Although Spray Painter does not offer a dedicated Share function, you could certainly share your images with friends via e-mail, social-networking sites, etc.

Published by developer Netox of Poland, Spray Painter runs on both current Symbian OS, S60 5.0 devices and the forthcoming Nokia N8 device based on Symbian^3.

The Spray Painter app is available now in Ovi Store for $0.99 (USD).