Who doesn’t love to doodle?

I still have the blue crayon doodle of my boyfriend hanging on my fridge that I mocked in my review for Adam’s Art back in June. Several months ago I reviewed a great kid’s app by the name of Adam’s Art that entailed coloring and otherwise painting motions, with the end result of you tacking the picture onto your iPhone “fridge.” Not only was it super cute, it was an effective coloring medium for the iPhone, a doodling app with an added punch.

Doodle Buddy by Pinger, Inc. bridges the gap between Microsoft Paint and the iPhone, transforming this popular, and in some ways, default platform to the iPhone. You start with a white screen, with a toolbar along the bottom for paint colors and brush size, some stock images running the typical gamut of smiley faces to soccer balls and animals, and a set of background templates, should basic white just be oh too boring a blank slate for you. Different backgrounds include a brick wall for the graffiti inclined, a chalk outline for the morbidly inclined, a beach setting, and several random line and dot arrangements, one of which resembles a computer circuit board. The dot arrangement had me a bit confused, until I remembered those dot drawing puzzles, where after following step-by-step directions, you methodically draw seemingly incongruous and nonsensical shapes until they form a cohesive whole at the end (in fourth grade I drew un burro in Spanish class). All in all, the backgrounds, along with the ability to import photos from your album, proved a good angle.

I enjoyed the scritch-scratch sound effects that accompany your drawing motions, and the myriad of sounds heard anytime you stamp a stock image. Some of them are creepy, like the maniacal laughter heard when you use the widely grinning smiley icon, or the gurgly syrupy sound when you splash down a blood spatter image. I was amused to aurally note the soccer ball’s bounce being heavier from its obvious outdoor use to the basketball’s airier bounce sound effect from being bounced on an indoor wooden court. Interesting, albeit random attention to detail on the developer’s part. The drawing motions you make with your finger tip are surprisingly fluid, with none of the jerkiness you’d expect from random jolts of touchscreen interaction dying out, and doodling about proves to be a satisfying experience.

Like any good girl, I started my doodling experiment by drawing out an idyllic meadow scene, complete with trees, blue skies on a sunny day, and birds afloat by some clouds. Next, obviously, would be the idyllic house portrait, with two hatched windows and a door idling between them, on a curiously small cottage with people far too big for such a munchkin house waving happily outside, standing, no doubt, near some giant daffodils. But, I have to grow up at some point, right? Get a little macabre, throw in a dash of the moribund. The chalk outline is fun to toy around with, but other than splattering some bloody splotches around, with the satisfying thwop thwop, there’s not much else to do. I guess I could draw some smiley faces and hopscotch squares in some New Yorker style satire on say, the streets of the Tenderloin, where danger abounds but children flock aplenty.

Doodle Buddy makes doodling a collective experience with its ability to seek out other Doodle Buddy users on your wi-fi search – what would any iPhone app be without social networking? So, instead of being the loner artist, branch out a little and extend a crudely drawn olive branch to a fellow doodler. You guys will be so happy together, especially since the chance of finding a local Doodle Buddy will be slim to none. It’s a good intention, though, and I probably would enjoy the experience of drawing a happy scene while my friend madly skewers my stick people with stakes of red. Hmmm, I must be playing with a boy.

Probably the best feature of Doodle Buddy is this neat hazing feature, like rubbing chalk drawings so the colors blend together and add dimension. If you check out Doodle Buddy on the iTunes store, one of the showcased artwork pieces is someone’s personal beach photo complemented by this amazing, drawn sky of blended pink, orange and blue. It’s really quite cool, and shows what exactly you can accomplish with this incredibly simple app if you put the time into it. Obviously, Doodle Buddy is meant just for fun, and kids are bound to love it, but it’s nice to know it can have some impressive results, all with the tip of your finger.