DrawQuest, it's been a while....

Categories: artwork

Date: 23 March 2014 19:31:12

I'm a big fan of the iOS art app DrawQuest. For those who don't know it is a community app that allows you to draw anything you like from a given image.

Todays, for example, was called 'draw me a mobile' and, before decoration, looked like this:

As soon as I saw it I knew that I wanted to draw an AT-AT from Empire Strikes Back so, an hour later, this had happened:

(and you can see a process video of the drawing come to be here: http://drawquest.com/p/5kqg6j)

It's been a while since I drew concertedly in the app (there was a time when I was doing all of the drawings daily but things change... I'd missed the app but my mind was elsewhere for one reason or another). Regardless: yesterday the theme was 'draw a still life' and THAT was right up my street for a variety of reasons I'll come to later.

(Still life, DrawQuest, iPad 3, Nomad and New Trent styli).

Sadly the app itself may not last forever (but then again, as the man with the mustache says, what does?) . Moot, the man behind both DrawQuest and 4Chan, wound up the development side of it at the start of the year. I remember the day I read the news and the shock it caused then and the sense of profound sadness which still lingers (even though the app still - at the moment and hopefully for a long while - works). A while later the team at DrawQuest HQ posted a plea for the community to step in and help the servers remain switched on which I hope has been successful? They're still on at the moment, which is a good sign.

The app has created a wonderful community of people who chat to each other in picture, in sub quests and through a variety of social media sites. I hope we all remain friends and, who knows, one day I hope we all manage to get to a DQ meet up somehow as it's one thing to draw with people on another side of the world but it'd be nice to draw sitting next to them as well.

And why did the still life bring me back to the app? Well, for the past couple of years I've drawn whatever came to mind with little sense of purpose, as I had enough things to deal with at work as it was to think up a project like the Dr Sylver books or the Wombat Wambot comic. Now I've got a project in mind, which I've already begun the planning processes of, and still life fits right into it (hence going to life drawing classes more regularly etc). We'll see if it comes out like the images I have in mind - this is a new road I'm going down for me - but I hope it does...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfZfwE0wHfc
(being a youtube video of a number of pictures animated and edited together but which won't embed, grr).

Anyway: here's to DrawQuest, the team that made it and the community which came from it. Cheers one and all...