The work behind it

How it was made.

Five chapters, in the order the work happened. Each one ends where the app is now, and links to the pages it came out of.

Those pages are working documents, not articles. They were written while a decision was being made and kept as they were, so most of them record an idea that lost. Every phone drawn in them is at the real size of a phone, so a button that looks small on the page is small in the hand, and every claim about another app says where it came from. Most of them can be played with.

Six squares of color, each showing two pigments mixed at every strength: red into black, yellow into blue making green, sienna into blue

Start here

The engine: how the paper got wet

From the first version to the one on the phone: a blur that was not water, paper that drinks, a dark edge chased and given up, colors that mixed to grey until they were worked out from real pigments, and a loop that went from 144 milliseconds a frame to one.

The other four

The palette Eight palettes in the order they happened: pairs of inks, a mixing well built three times, the 24 color tin, a dial, stacks of five, and the four small palettes that shipped.

The hand A phone cannot feel you press, so the width of a mark comes from how much of your fingertip is on the glass, how long you rest, and what is left in the brush.

Your sheets No save button, no file names and no folders. What six other libraries do with your work, and why this one asks nothing of you but painting.

Four answers to an unwanted mark, compared

A mark you do not want Water, a lifting tool, and white paint in two places, compared. This is the page that argued the app should not have an undo.

All the investigations

Fourteen pages, in full. Each chapter links to the ones it draws on.

Color

Fewer colors, three strengthsThe four palettes in the app, and why the ones before them felt wrong.
Every palette so farEight of them, each measured the same way.
Sets of fiveSeven ways of choosing five, scored on what each can reach.
Stacks of five, swiped betweenThe card and the swipe, at true phone scale.
The color dial, and the arcA radial menu, then a single arc from warm to cold. Both lost.
The running record of colorEverything tried for showing color, and what happened to each.
Palettes with a wellWhat a palette can reach once a dish can mix and dilute.
Making a mixing area feel like paintFour ways, with the stir idea as a working demo.
The first three directionsComplementary, Traditional and Wide gamut, with their ramps.

The interface

Brush thicknessFour ways to ask for a thin line, drawable at phone scale.
The radial dial prototypeExpand, contract, spin and swap, tested against a thumb.
A mark you do not wantFour answers, and the case against undo.
The icon proposalsTen of them in the family's language, and the one that was chosen.

The engine

Water, mixing, tiltFour things that felt wrong on the phone, each cause, and the same scenes before and after.