While it’s been pretty quiet over here on the site, it’s mainly because life has gotten in the way. This includes work, finding a house to buy, sorting out a wedding and a few public holidays with family obligations have all had their toll on my time.

One thing that has happened in the last couple of days however is the fact that I’ve finally started using my iPhone for something other than consuming data and information. It’s now become something I am creating art on….I know. I basically bought Brushes, which after testing out Sketch Pro and Adobe’s Ideas is by far the single best art creating software app in the app store. Simply because of the work follow process and the fact that the creators seem to understand how someone using the iPhone would go about creating art.

One of the things that I absolutely love is the fact that in contrast to something like Photoshop the toolset is limited (as you would expect) but having less things to think about, actually means that by limiting yourself you become more inventive with how you show things, you stop depending on the software and trying to solve a problem by thinking. One thing I’m thinking is stuff life layer effects. Apart from transparency there isn’t much more you can do. You can merge layers down and rearranging them, and that’s about it. The limitation increases the boundaries.

My current tool of choice is the Pogo Sketch Stylus. It’s a tiny little thing, beautifully designed, although I’m honestly all that sure about the nib. I know, the most important part right? Well the nib on this is a fluffy spongy ball, which is pretty responsive. As I’ve not seen or tried any alternative I have no idea which one works better. I would have imagined that a hard rubber tip to be better for this sort of thing, but without a sample from somewhere I can’t tell. I might ask someone to lend me an old Stylus (nopefully something that’s a little meatier than the traditional thin metal strips that came with most Palm handhelds.

Speaking of limitations, I think the size of the actual phone means that feature creep will be limited, but hopefully they will provide additional features. Personally I would welcome the following features:

1. More layers. I think 4 just isn’t enough. I know the iPad version has 6. While I like the fan formation of the layers, doing them in a row might save on space and allow for additional layers.

2. I would like to be able to move things around on a layer easily. The way this could be done is within the layers view.

3. The ability to choose a colour and add them in a favourite dock (I think the iPad version has this, which really means they need to bring that somehow to the iPhone. As I am using the same colour palette for the project I am working on, I’ve created a layer with the colours I generally use, how it’s a whole layer, and when you’ve only got 4 it’s creates an additional limit, which I can see they’ve resolved on the iPad version..

One thing I hadn’t realized was that there is a Mac viewer which provides to things. The first is a much higher resolution of the drawing you’re working on and also a video with all of your steps as you created the drawing, which I think is really great fun to see the process in front of you.

Since I bought this app, it is by far my most used one on my phone. The blog is pretty quiet at the moment (they’ve not posted anything since August) which is a shame as I’m sure there is a ton of stuff that people have been creating since then.

How many images have I created so far? So far it’s 5. I’m aiming for a minimum of 1 a day. I don’t think it’s too difficult as some of these images I’m able to create pretty quickly. There is a purpose to all of this. It has nothing to do with my main graphic novel, which has been coming along slowly but surely. It’s great to see the pages slowly taking form, but this is a side project that provides me with a great deal of liberation and pretty quick gratification of creating a character, then another, then a world that they live in, all within a week.

Watch this space as I will be talking about this a lot more in the coming weeks and months – I honestly have a good feeling about this.