Let Your Fingers Do The Painting

The cover of this week’s “The New Yorker” magazine was made through an unlikely tool: an iPhone. Yes, you read it correctly! Jorge Colombo, a Portuguese born artist created the digital artwork using the Brushes app on his iPhone. It’s a $4.99 application that allows you to create drawings on your iPhone or iPod Touch using your fingers.

Brushes screen shot

In the hands of a gifted artist such as Jorge, the results of this application is short of amazing. You’d never guess that the cover artwork was done with the iPhone.

The great thing about drawing with an iPhone as your tool is that you can draw in the dark. The backlight makes it easy to draw under dim or low light situations. The draw back is that it’s harder to draw under sun light.

The Brushes application can simulate several brushes, as well as a host of colors including transparencies. Brushes also saves your strokes in the file and you can actually use the Brushes Viewer application for Mac OS X to view the step by step process of what you just did. The viewer application is free. You can export them as QuickTime movies.

Check out the story at the New Yorker blog. More information about Jorge can be found on his web site. Download the Brushes application here and visit the official web site here. Watch how the cover for “The New Yorker” was made below.