Windmill, Klein Wetsinge, Netherlands, detail

Windmill, Klein Wetsinge, the ensemble from a distance

Sometimes you are struck by the beauty of the light on an object. On this cold November morning the sun, and the fog were in a tense battle for hegemony. Now and then a warm glow penetrated the grey fog. A very subtle, subdued, natural palette.

The Gnostic Painters

Drawn with the Brushes app on the iPad 2 using a stylus by Ozaki.

"Off-course, a minor disturbance". Made with Brushes on the iPad 2

'Metaphysics'. Created with 'Brushes'.

Underworld Flower. Created with 'Brushes'

Silo.Made with Brushes on the iPad 2

Following yesterday’s post about art- and drawing apps for the iPad and iPad 2 I discovered and purchased ‘Brushes’ by Steve Sprang. Well, I’m not the first one, and certainly not the only one because the app is widely praised and publicized. The app has drawn the aloof attention by the New Yorker and was even used to paint some of their stylish magazine covers. The Flickr group of Brushes users sports (as of today, 25/09/11) 3574 members who collectively posted 34,643 images created with the app.

Brushes is a incredibly well-designed drawing app and an absolute joy to use. The preset brushes that come with the app are infinitely adaptable, which enables the artist to create a wealth of visual effects. Its ease of use, and intuitive tools (I love the color palette with the small color cups) allow for speed, which in itself sparks creativity and spontaneity. Zooming in and out by quickly tapping twice on the surface makes it even faster.

Of course, people are asking for more, more brush patterns; more, and better export possibilities, more layers. And right they are. The coolness of this app causes it to be adopted by a host of creative and critical individuals craving for everything that supports their urge to create.

The only drawback is its mesmerizing quality; when working on my fourth Brushes-drawing just before writing this I ignored the iPad’s final warning that the battery was running low, and in the middle of some concentrated cross-hatching the ominous black surface with the ‘logging off’ animation appeared. Well, time for a coffee then.

Mythic Bird. Made with DA Muro (online)

Arrival of provisions. Made with Adobe Ideas

Over the months I use the ubiquitous iPad 2 I have purchased and tried a number of drawing-, and art-apps, but I have also used the iPad in combination with online drawing applications. Some of these apps really make the most of the iPad´s capabilities and screen size. In combination with a stylus (I use an Ozaki stylus) you can just sit anywhere and draw. I still prefer the Wacom Cintiq. Its pressure sensitivity, precision, and sensitivity to angle and rotation are unequalled. But the Cintiq confines you to your desk, while with the iPad you can sketch on the go. The iPad can take the role of sketchbook, while the Cintiq may be the equivalent of the studio easel. This may soon change again when the elusive Wacom Inkling, a real drawing pen that stores your work, is available again.

The combination of iPad and stylus allows for more precision, and fine cross-hatching than I expected. Zooming in, you can work in surprizing detail, when the app allows it, that is. After some time the resistance of the rubber tip of the stylus against the surface of the tablet can create an uneasy strain in your arm. You don’t have this with the Wacom, but there people sometimes complain about the lack of resistance. Nothing is quite like the soft resistance of pencil on paper, of course.

Among the apps I have tried sofar are Wasabi Paint, iDesign (t be reviewed in the next post), Intaglio SketchPad (to be reviewed in the next post), Adobe Ideas, Sketchbook Pro, Bamboo Paper, and Moleskine. A host of other apps are still waiting to be used. IDesign by Touchaware, Intaglio SketchPad by Purgatory Design, Adobe Ideas by Adobe, Wasabi Paint by Lofopi, and Sketchbook Pro by Autodesk are serious apps that can even be used in a real production pipeline (enabling you to work in otherwise wasted situations, like waiting for your children when they have violin lessons, or sitting on the couch wondering why most of the 700+ channels in your TV subscription just suck). The others (Bamboo Paper, and Moleskine) allow you to take quick notes and dabble. Their design is fantastic, but they are too limited to be of any serious use.

In a next post I will look at their functionality is more detail, also showing some of more technical,  vector-based apps, here I just give some  quickly made drawings. I start with the very clever online tool DA Muro, by Deviant Art. I must say that DA Muro works better with a Cintiq than with the iPad.

Megalithic sunset. Made with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro

Transport by sea and on the road. Made with Adobe Ideas.

Biomorphous. Made with Wasabi paint.

Leap of Faith. Made with Adobe Ideas, adjusted in Sketchbook Pro

view on maneuvering ships, Eemshaven, Holland, tilt-shift technique

For some reason objects with painted metal surfaces do very well as faux miniatures, using the tilt-shift technique.

This elegant naval ballet lasted about 20 minutes.

iron gate, one of the 365 daily pictures by Tom Wachtel transformed

Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1957 (based on a photograph by Jane Bown)

Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer 1908-2004. Based on a photograph taken in 1957 by Jane Bown (1925).

aaahr! (E. Bruinsma 2011)

In the header of this blog there is at least one element that will soon be inintelligible (a nice neoplatonic synonym for ‘incomprehensible’) for many people. The disappearance of iconic forms proceeds with a speed comparable to that of the eclipse of species in the natural world. The telephone, consisting of a lumpy black body connected to a heavy horn that fitted snugly in a sailor’s fist by a crinkly cord. The radio, with a dial, a needle that moves across a glass surface inscribed with the names of the stations. The book, consisting of bound leaves of paper, squeezed in between stiff boards, covered with linen or leather. The light-bulb, a glass balloon filled with a helical filament that emits light when heated by an electric current.The TV, the computer, even the cell-phone… and so on. Many of these easily identifiable forms play an important part in the design of icons, signs, instructions, visual explanations, and in the transmission of ideas across languages and cultures.

iconic shapes (E. Bruinsma 2011)

Many of these expressive forms are replaced by the stereotype of the first decade of the twenty-first century: a box. Even the big piled-up boxes that still ruled the living room of the turn of the century (cd-player, dvd-player, amplifier, receiver), will soon be obsolete and replaced by even smaller boxes. Design savvy people will have smooth and slick boxes with slightly rounded corners and impeccable finish, while pragmatic people will have less sophisticated boxes. Vinyl records, big black circles with a hole in the centre, have been replaced by smaller translucent disks, and these smaller disks will eventually eclipse when all audiovisual entertainment is stored in a tiny flat box that you connect to your small hifi boxes.

For the designers of information graphics this creates a growing dilemma. When every function, action, concept or notion can be represented by a box, it will be increasingly difficult to visualize abstract ideas without harnessing the knowledge of the world that is present in the user invoking the help of iconic real-world shapes to get your message through. With the possible exception of the light-bulb, which will only miss its filament, being replaced by LED’s, arranged in a pattern that looks like a circular array of little yellow stickers. At least the triumphant “EUREKA” accompanied by the light-bulb will be with us for a bit longer.

instruments in the Oval Room, Teylers Museum, Haarlem, NL

Working on a project for Teylers Museum Haarlem, NL), I shot some video notes to work on back home. Still fragments of these images often have a special aesthetic appeal of their own.