Our pal Philipp Lenssen of Blogoscoped and Mike Dougherty came up with a pretty nifty iPhone app called The Magic Artist. All you have to do is take a snapshot (or open an existing photo) and watch it turned into a painting brush stroke by brush stroke:

This project started its life as a JavaScript/ Canvas prototype (I was looking into letting you enter a term, grab an image via Google Images, then draw it), but I was running into a zone where it looked like I would have had to support image uploads or provide some image proxy for the necessary JavaScript rights. The iPhone app, programmed by Mike Dougherty, solves this issue, and the nice thing is that you already have a camera at hand when you have a phone (and that Objective-C as used on the iPhone is fast).

Link – Thanks Philipp!

The turtle pic that Philipp used as an example (see the footer of this blog) is originally drawn by Nathan Mazur of Scared of Bees

Remember the memory game "concentration" that you play with cards?

Well, Philipp Lenssen of Games for the Brain (Philipp is also the man behind the awesome Google Blogoscoped blog) and Nikolai Kordulla created a version that will challenge your aural memory as opposed to your visual one. Check out Soundory, which uses snippets Amazon MP3 widget – it’s quite a lot of fun!

Link – Thanks Philipp!

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped, Nikolai Kordulla and Dominik Schmid have just released a nifty new website called Sketchory. The site features over 250,000 sketches (cartoons, scribbles and other fascinating artwork) that you can copy, remix, embed, view as animation and so on.

The sketches use Creative Commons license, so you’re free to use it even in commercial settings (say, create a book of sketches – with a maximum of 1,000 images).

Check it out: Link – Thanks Philipp!