Pocket Artist

Among the many cool little applications included on my PDA is a little paint program.
Obviously a PDA isn't an ideal "canvas," but for such a tiny program it is pretty full-featured.
Here are some doodles I did over the weekend at work:


This is my first sketch after discovering the program's existence. It's a sketch of my co-worker Chris, as he was sitting to my right, and so was the first thing I saw when I looked up from the PDA to find something to draw.



This is just some random doodle I made while waiting on hold for an extended period of time trying to get an update from a vendor. It's not really supposed to be anything, though I suppose there is a sort of demonic face in there.



Here's a rather impressionistic version of a tree, making use of some of the different brush styles included in the program.



Here's a picture of Fontaine, one of my favorite characters. As you can see, I'm getting a little better at using the program to render finer details.



And here we have Ren, another favorite character of mine. I did this one after I discovered that the program actually does have a control for setting the width of the brush stroke.
I find it kind of odd that in the fifteen plus years that I've been attempting to render an accurate image of Ren using various media (pencils, paints, collages, digital tools), this is the closest I've come to getting her features to look exactly the way I want them to look. Sure, it's not an especially detailed image, or even especially good (though I think that it's surprisingly good considering the medium), but the basic "look" is there more than it is in any other image I've created of Ren.
The fact that I accomplished that feat with a medium that's nowhere near as well-suited to the task as any of the others I mentioned is just...well, I don't know what it is. Ironic? Sad? Pathetic? Just plain weird?
The whole experience of the slight learning curve and gradually developing skill within the very limited capabilities of the program reminds me of using Microsoft Paint for the first time around eleven years ago.
(It should be mentioned, by the way, that the painting program on my PDA is more fully-featured than even the current version of Paint that ships with new computers)
Over time I developed my ability to use Paint to what may very well be the limit of human capability...without massive amounts of patience and talent, at least.
Eventually I got better tools to work with, but it was a valuable lesson, and one I can apply to my new toy, as I now have a digital sketchpad I can carry with me anywhere.