While bloggers and tech writers all over are speculating about what will be the killer app for Apple's iPad, going on sale this Saturday, artists all over are still happy with the silent killer app for iPhone: Brushes.

The easy-to-use program is useful for quick sketches on the run, but the artist who first took it seriously - Jorge Colombo - has turned it into a medium of choice. Just over a year ago, Colombo, whose drawings have been published in The New Yorker since 1994, created the first cover for that magazine to be done on an iPhone.

Three iPhone drawings from Jorge Colombo's website, copyright the artist.

On The New Yorker blog he wrote, "I got a phone in the beginning of February [2009], and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself," says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. "Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner's hat, I could not draw in the dark." (When the sun is up, it's a bit harder, "because of the glare on the phone," he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he's checking his e-mail.

"The best feature of it is that it doesn't feel like something that was done digitally; quite the opposite," said Francoise Mouly, the art editor for The New Yorker, in an interview for the New York Times. "All too often the technology is directed in only one direction, which is to make things more tight, and this, what he did very well, is use this technology for something that is free flowing, and I think that's what makes it so poetic and magical."

Now Colombo is sharing the magic in a lecture/workshop at Society of Illustrators next week. If you email or call right away, you stand a chance of getting in. Wednesday, April 7, 6:30-8:30. For tickets ($25 non-menters; $15 members; $10 students) email kb@societyillustrators.org or call 212-838-2560. The Society of Illustrators is located at 128 East 63rd Street (between Park and Lexington Avenues), New York, NY.

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