Valhalla Island

What bothers me most about Photoshop is the administration — creating new layers, having to select between layers, making shapes by way of first making a selection, having to confirm transformations, etc. They’re barriers to the flow of creativity. It’s a big part of the reason I use Illustrator, drawing an object creates it’s own pseudo layer that works just like a layer without the forced administration. Objects can then be moved and modified freely. Anyway, Scribbles is a relatively new drawing app with a super simple and intuitive interface and layer system.

The audio-less, couple of minutes screencast demonstrates all of Scribbles features. Spend two minutes watching the screencast and you know everything there is to know.

There’s a number of refreshing features in Scribbles. One of my favourites is the infinite canvas, draw as big as you like and keep on drawing without the need to expand your canvas or art board. Another is the method of moving, scaling and rotating layers. Click the button and three layers of rings appear over the image, dragging inside the middle ring moves, the second ring rotates and the third ring scales. This makes multiple transforms super quick.

It’s entirely vector based so modifications are easy, anything you draw can be dynamically altered and strokes are silky smooth. The colour picker transcends Scribbles alone with the ability to choose colours outside of the application, a feature more advanced than anything Creative Suite provides.

As much as I dislike having to create, move and modify layers at all, Scribbles has the most enjoyable, frictionless implementation. It’s entirely visual and difficult to explain in words.

It’s a click to select a layer and just drag and drop to reorder them, minus to delete and plus to add — it couldn’t be simpler. All the features you need when it comes to layers and nothing more.

Also refreshing is the single window interface — something rarely seen in graphics applications but something I’m very fond of as a whole.

I do have a few small criticisms. The icon used for scaling a layer is the same used inside Scribbles (and universally) for moving which is confusing, especially when the appropriate icon is used for rotate in the same transform context. It would be nice to not have to click the X to exit the colour selection palette, I’d like some kind of keyboard shortcut that I could hold down while I adjust colour and then let go to save. I’d also like something similar for layer modification — having to click the X is cumbersome.

The stroke palette does a good job here, selecting a stroke also closes the palette and you can immediately resume drawing. I know the colour and layer palettes have more than one control so the select and close method wouldn’t work there but I think a held down keyboard combination would work well.

I have an Illustration set on Flickr where I’m dropping all my Scribbler works of art. My current hobby is portraits of my internet friends and to answer your question, yes, I’m taking requests!

Don’t judge Scribbles by my crappy drawings though. It provides a free gallery you can upload to from within the app. There you can find some really great, detailed work.