Video Story: Drawing a 'New Yorker' Cover

Here's a video story about the creation of this week's cover art for New Yorker magazine -- made possible by, implausibly, iPhone technology.

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, a $4.99 application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

The advantage of the program, says Colombo, is that it enables him to draw in the dark, and also to draw unobtrusively, as passersby presume he's merely checking his email. And, of course, it's portable.

Its companion application, Brushes Viewer, makes a video reconstructing each step of how Colombo composed the picture (below). What you're not seeing, the artist confesses, is his reliance on the "Undo" feature (i.e. the missteps and do-overs) so that the process seems more linear and self-assured than it was in real life.

But watching the video playback has made him aware that how he draws a picture can tell a story, and he’s hoping to build suspense as he builds up layers of color and shape.

Read more here.