Brushes and Bunnies

A week or so ago I bought Brushes, a “finger painting” app for the iPhone.

I bought it, not because I believe I can ever create anything like the results shown on the site (!), but because it is the antithesis of how I normally work with graphics: there is no precision, no pixel-level tweaking, heck, half the time you can’t even tell where you’re drawing because your finger is in the way. I bought it because I wanted to see if I could actually give up the level of control that pencils, pens, fine brushes and Photoshop have given me in the past.

Then, a couple of days ago, Codepope passed me a link to a fun meme.

I rarely do memes, partly because no-one tags me (thank you!) and partly because most are either too trivial — answer a dozen questions and get a badge that doesn’t reflect your personality — or too time-consuming — list 30 things people don’t know about you — but every now and then one turns up that appeals, and this was one of those. The fact that it also gave me the perfect opportunity to try out Brushes was a bonus.

So here we go, two bunnies, one happy, one not so much…

I’m not about to tag anyone to draw their own bunnies, but if the idea appeals then why not, it doesn’t have to take long…

So anyway, what do I think of Brushes?

It’s certainly challenging to go back to a style of drawing that is as close to finger painting as anything I’ve done since primary school.

It’s refreshing to be able to not worry about the end result being perfect.

The interface is exceptionally well thought out and eminently usable.

And its blank canvas is small enough to not be intimidating.

I think that this is one purchase I shan’t regret.

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Watching

Based on one of my photos. Much tweaking with gradient maps, levels and colour layers to create a more illustrative feel.

Created September 2003

Memorial Cross

Based on one of my photos. Experimenting with gradient maps to add colour to what was a very grey photo taken on a very grey day.

Created February 2004

Median Landscape

Adapted from one of my photographs. Used the median filter to remove detail and give a vaguely painterly feel with some noise over the top to add a little texture back.

Created September 2005

iPod on the Tube

Based on a photo of a London Underground warning poster which was just crying out for the addition of an iPod.

Created August 2005

Blot

Created while playing around in Photoshop, this became the motif for my personal business cards for a while.

Created March 2004

Smaller World

This was based on the first freehand pencil sketch I had done in years which by some miracle turned out to be not complete rubbish so I dragged it into Photoshop and made this.

Created January 2005

Neon

One of these days I’ll find a method of creating neon exactly the way I like it, until then, this comes pretty close. Adapted from a tutorial in “How to Cheat in Photoshop” by Steve Caplin.

Created May 2003

LUL Footprints

Inspired by the 2001 London Underground posters exhorting people to stay behind the yellow line and to be careful if they’re drunk, I decided to highlight a far more frustrating behaviour…

Created August 2001