Hours of digital drawing can now be beautifully traced thanks to IOGraphica, one of many applets now available for digital sketching.

Russian designer Anatoly Zenkov (who "can do anything"!) has developed a nifty application called MousePath, which proved fairly popular on his Flickr photostream, so along with his buddy Andrey Shipilov, developed the application into IOGraphica which you can now download and experiment with.


Drawing of drawing a kitchen pantry, by Marcus Trimble.

I came across this at Super Colossal's blog, where the Sydney-based Architect Marcus Trimble published his drawing of drawing a kitchen pantry (pictured).  The embedded history of a digital drawing is pretty intriguing stuff, making the 'back catalogue' of an entire piece of work readily available, and if things are done well enough (and parametrically), sneaky trips in the near-past of drawings might soon allow retrospective iterations to open up the flexibility of architectural design drawings.  But compared to my feeble dabbling in the topic, read Daniel Davis's blog, Digital Morphogenesis, who really told me about all this.  In particular his recent post on Excel and GUI will be of interest.

For the less computationally-inclined, there are number of sketching applets out there as well, I think I've mentioned OdoSketch before, which I still quite like, as a curious example of digital sketching attempting to mimic analogue drawing (like the 'unsteady-hand line' in Sketch-up), but thanks to Super Colossal again, I came across a more exciting algorithmic applet, called Harmony, by Ricardo Cabello (a.k.a. Mr. Doob) which offers a basic range of 'pen tools' (again that analogue language...) for your sketch, but has the pretty gorgeous effect of manufacturing near-infinite connections between your drawing line and the previous lines on the page.  Definitely worth a digital doodle (the title image was made using Harmony).


Sketch from Harmony.

I couldn't find anything especially useful to visualise keystrokes, as I type here rather boringly (my Mouse Tracking pictured below, the last 2 hours of my internet related and typing activity is a series of pauses and erratic tracks), beyond basic magnification and projection, I would love to have an application measure and visualise keyboard dexterity for example, as well as key frequency, key combinations and so on... if it's out there, let me know.



Also if you know of any more great digital sketching websites I'd love to gather a bit of a collection together, I think they may offer interesting pedagogic opportunities now that nobody knows how to draw with a pencil (yes, I saw you cruelly throwing out those drawing boards Schools of Architecture, and no, your students can't draw very well anymore.)

Images from Anatoly Zenkov's Photostream, Super Colossal, and me.