Artist paints New Yorker cover with iPhone
Just when you thought that all of the possible uses for an iPhone had been thoroughly taken advantage of, along comes an artist that is able to use the mobile device to paint magazine covers.
Yes, sure, you can level a shelf, play the harmonica, and find your way home using an iPhone. Well, and make phone calls, too. But nothing new has happened lately, has it? As it turns out, something new has happened, according to a New York Times article. Artist Jorge Colombo created this week’s cover for The New Yorker magazine with his iPhone.
The cover, which is a depiction of a New York hot dog stand, was drawn entirely with hand gestures using the iPhone app Brushes. New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly was very impressed with the cover art. He said, “The best feature of it is that it doesn’t feel like something that was done digitally; quite the opposite. All too often the technology is directed in only one direction, which is to make things more tight, and this, what he did very well, is use this technology for something that is free flowing, and I think that’s what makes it so poetic and magical.”
The cover does indeed have a very soft, dreamlike quality about it rather than the highly technical look that one would naturally expect from a computer device. Colombo purchased his iPhone in February of this year, and downloaded the $4.99 Brushes application shortly after that. He says that the portability and accessibility of the medium appealed to him. Colombo started the scene by drawing the buildings’ structure, then he layered on the taxis, neon lights, hot-dog stand and people.
Columbo said that the iPhone “made it easy for me to sketch without having to carry all my pens and brushes and notepads with me, and I like the fact that I am drawing with a set of tools that anybody can have easily in their pocket.” There is another advantage of the phone, as well: no one notices he is drawing. The artist apparently stood on busy 42nd Street for about an hour with no interruptions.
The iPhone may have become one of those magical devices which seems like it is all things to all people. That is part of its popularity. It is much like a sleek all-purpose tool that you can carry in your pocket - sort of an attractive Swiss Army knife for modern society. If the competition cannot capture that feeling, it is not really competition.
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