Don Shank's iPad paintings

I'm a huge admirer of Don Shank's art. Recently on his blog he posted some paintings he made using his iPad.

Above are a handful of paintings I did on my iPad with the Brushes app for iPad. I love this app. Yes, I've tried Sketchbook Pro, I like it fine, it's a great app, but I'm drawn more to the simple directness of Brushes. It's a pleasure to use. (Though there are a few things I wish it had (Saturation Slider please!))

Also, one of the coolest things is you can play back your painting right there on the iPad and watch as it re-creates itself. Even better you can email yourself the "actions" file for the painting to your computer and using the free Brushes Viewer application it can re-render the image up to 6x high and wide (that's 4608pixels by 6144 pixels!) The images here on my blog were shrunk down from that size to 2000 x 1500. It will export Quicktime movies too, I'll post some movies in the future.

If you like Shank's art, I recommend The Ancient Book of Sex and Science, which features Shank's work along with three other gifted animation artists: Nate Wragg, Scott Morse, and Lou Romano.

Don Shank's iPad paintings

• Laboratory Still Life 02 by Don Shank

• [irksome]

  See, I was hoping he’d painted them ON iPads.

• [Spookyland]

  Impressive work for a platform like this – I like the luminosity Don achieves, even if I am not familar with his toolset.

  I’m guessing that this is not the same feller as Hollywood stuntman Don Shanks (Michael Meyers in Halloween 5 or Nakoma on Grizzly Adams).

• [murray]

  There’s something about this that troubles me.

• [graf79ok]

  awesome!! I’ve try to painting by my hand to a canvas. I am a beginner after look at his painting I feel…wow!! it’s too difficult for me. How is it prodigy he is??

• [Marktech]

  Does nothing for me at all, I’m afraid.

  On the other hand, broadly speaking this sort of thing -

  http://images.google.com/images?q=hockney+ipad

  • [bjacques]

    @Marktech:

    Last October I had the privilege of seeing a show of David Hockney’s iPhone and iPad paintings. It was at the Pierre Berger Foundation in Paris. They’re very impressive close up. Hockney did more works than could be displayed in the hall, so the devices were put in slideshow mode.

• [saehn]

  Miro much? :-)

• [Anonymous]

  But iOS is about consumption not creation. The winboys will have none of it.

• [Brainspore]

  Pretty rad. I can’t wait to see what artists start doing with those things once Apple finally releases one with a Wacom-style pressure sensitive stylus.

• [ToMajorTom]

  I wonder if someone has studied the ability of an analog artist to transfer his/her talents to a digital medium. From my personal experience, I can draw a stick figure using Brushes on my iPad with as much “talent” as I can draw using pencil and paper. An iPad didn’t suddenly make me artistic (sadly).

  In any case, well done, Mr. Shank!

• [Anonymous]

  I love your paintings, They look so very promising.