Christopher Poole, the man behind some of the web’s biggest hits like 4Chan and Canvas, launched a new iPad app today. DrawQuest is a painting app that lets you doodle on templates to create cartoon scenes and share them with others. The idea, says Poole, is to give people not only the tools but also the inspiration to have fun drawing.
Fire up the app, and you’re presented with a daily “quest,” basically just a template to doodle on that gets you started. For example, yesterday’s was “draw a superhero” and featured an outline of a figure in a cape, set against a blue sky. You can also go back and doodle on previous quests. There’s a color palette to work with, a brush, marker and pen tool, plus an eraser. It’s enough to get you started, but the tools also let you color over the template itself and create something wholly original. The idea is to give some direction and inspiration, but also leave as much room as people need to get creative. “We didn’t just want it to just be color-in-the-lines,” Poole told Wired.
Here, for example, is yesterday’s Draw a Superhero template, and my subsequent drawing. It’s quite awful! But I had fun making it, which, really, is the point.
DrawQuest isn’t a game, exactly, although you can score points (largely for participation) that let you buy in-game tools, like additional colors for your paint palette. There’s a social component that lets you follow other people and see their drawings, but you could certainly use it in complete isolation as well. And one of its most interesting features isn’t creative at all, but a feature that lets you play back videos of others’ drawing processes, showing artworks as they are made from start to finish.
What’s maybe most interesting about DrawQuest, however, isn’t its canvas tools. It’s that it’s not just a drawing app, but an attempt to kick-start the creative process for people who don’t think of themselves as creatives. Both 4Chan and Canvas rely completely on user-generated content. But Poole tells Wired that a small minority of people who visit either site are actually creating content — most just consume. It’s a classic one-percent rule situation. “People think of creativity as binary, like its either on or its off,” Poole explained, “but that’s not true.”
Instead, he argues, creativity is a continuum. And while one person may be able to sit down to a blank slate and come away with something utterly amazing, others need lots of direction. DrawQuest is an attempt to inspire both of those types of people, and everyone in between. The result is a quirky and charming little app. It’s free, and currently only available on iOS for the iPad.
How a Charming Doodling App Arose From the Web's Wildest West
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How a Charming Doodling App Arose From the Web's Wildest West
