iPhone Geekery

Over the past couple of years, I become more involved with the North Shore Web Geeks, a monthly meetup of web professionals from Boston’s North Shore and New Hampshire Seacoast. Last night’s meeting was a blast, despite the fact that powerful winds knocked out power in Newburyport later in the evening.

Considering the geeky vibe of the evening, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to do some sketching on my iPhone. I’ve been messing around with the wonderful drawing app, Brushes, for a little while now. It’s a great app capable of some incredible things, but it’s taking me a little while to get the hang of drawing on it. The drawings above are of three of the panel members for the evening’s Great CMS Debate: John Eckman (Optaros) , Jay Batson (Acquia) and Marc Amos (Boston Web Studio). I wasn’t able to get any drawings of the panelist’s fourth member, Tom Herer (Atom Group). I am sure Tom’s broken up that he didn’t get the same crudely drawn immortalization as his panel mates.

These are quick (two to three minute) drawings and are admittedly pretty rough. Drawing on the iPhone takes a bit of getting use to, and I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it yet. For some reason, I am totally incapable of drawing effectively on the iPhone with my finger. A little digging on the internet pointed me in the direction of  the Pogo Sketch Stylus. The Pogo does it’s job, but it’s still miles away from drawing with a real pencil or pen. The other obstacle with drawing on the iPhone is the size. The drawing area is even smaller than a small Moleskine. While the app lets you zoom in and out, I still find it difficult to work at the iPhone size.

Despite these limitations, drawing on the iPhone is really fun. As I get use to the app, I have just been doing a lot of line drawings (with a little tone). As I get more acclimated to it, I hope to explore more of the app’s painting capabilities.

If you get Brushes for your iPhone, I highly recommend you download Brushes Viewer, the free desktop companion. Brushes Viewer allows you to view the raw Brushes files. From these, you can create a video of the drawing in progress, or you can export the drawings themselves at higher resolutions.