RateMyDrawings

I stumbled across an interesting site today called ratemydrawings.com. It provides an online drawing program with several different drawing tools and control over line weight and transparency. The really interesting part, though, is that it saves the sequence of drawing "events" - things like pen strokes and shape fills - and allows other users to play back that sequence. The effect is that one can watch an abbreviated version of the artist drawing the work from scratch. An animated pencil keeps directs the viewer's attention to where the action is happening. Very cool! :)

It's fascinating to see the different ways in which people draw. You can sometimes infer the artist's background from the way they build up their illustration: Someone who draws dark tones first and layers lighter ones on top may have experience painting, for example. Or people who use markers, like I do, tend to do the reverse, drawing lighter shades first and going over them with darker colors. (I take issue with Jan's quote on Thursday that computer science people tend to draw like 3-year-olds on a bad day. :P) It would be interesting to see if artists have a basic pattern that they adhere to - always starting with the eyes on a portrait, for example - or if the method is as different as each drawing it's applied to.

Here is an example of the playback in action.