June 1st New Yorker Cover Drawn Entirely on the iPhone

Artist Jorge Colombo took about an hour to fingerpaint an intricate Times Square scene on his iPhone using Brushes, a $US4.99 iPhone drawing app. Now, it’s the June 1st cover for The New Yorker.

I’m guessing the editors of the magazine saw some kind of weighty symbolism in such a stunt, but landing a New Yorker cover is the kind of honour that would define an entire career for many illustrators. That’s not to say this kind of thing isn’t impressive—it really, really is—but I can’t help imagining some dusty, 93-year-old editor at the top floor of the Conde Nast building seeing his first iPhone in the hands of an intern, losing his monocle over this amazing new tech-nol-o-gee, and impulsively ordering something, anything to do with this MAGICKAL DEE-VICE to be put on the cover, now.

Also odd: for quite a few weeks now, the magazine has been running full-page iPhone App Store ads on its back cover, making this issue a probable iPhone sandwich. Conspiracy!?!? (No.)

Anyway, back to the point: this is pretty neat. You can actually see how Colombo painted his scene, start to finish, in the video below, recorded using Brushes companion app Brushes Viewer. [New Yorker]