After spending most of his life tackling the world of digital media, 4chan and Canv.as founder Chris “moot” Poole has gone back to basics with a gamified iPad drawing app called DrawQuest.
The idea is that you spend most of your childhood representing and expressing yourself through art, whether it be pictures or words or some combination. But after a certain age, the majority of us become consumers, trying to pack the maths and sciences and spread sheets and meeting planners into our brain.
“Putting an adult in front of a blank piece of paper and a pen and ask them to do something with it is one of the scariest situations you can put them in,” explains Poole.
After founding Canv.as (post 4chan), Poole found that around 10 percent of users were using the remix feature, which lets you add text, drawings, and essentially meme-ify pictures and re-share them. They worked for a long time refining the webapp’s image editor, and realized that it wasn’t the quality of the editor, but a general insecurity to start creating that hindered growth of the feature.
That’s where DrawQuest comes in. DrawQuest offers a daily challenge, with a question and a template to start off the creative process. The editing tools are relatively simple, offering a marker, pencil, paintbrush, and eraser, along with a color wheel with the basic ROYGBIV + BW spectrum.
Every picture you complete and submit into the daily pool is an opportunity to get stars from friends and accrue coins, which can go toward more colors and other add-ons.
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The most interesting feature is the ability to watch a replay of any given drawing, to see how the artist set up the shot and went step by step.
The whole motivation is giving people a place to start drawing and learning. Poole told TechCrunch that he never imagined how good some of the drawings would be, but that DrawQuest is more about giving people the tools they need to express themselves.
At the end of the day, it’s not as much about having a beautiful work of art that you frame on your wall, but about having an artistic outlet.
In its first two weeks of availability, the DrawQuest app has seen over 500K downloads with over 1 million quests completed by users. The app is available now and can be found in the Apple App Store.