Artist creates astounding works by 'finger painting' with her iPhone

Antoinette “Annie” Raman is a fine-arts graduate in the advertising industry.

She's a mixed-media artist with no discernible style, expressing her varied life experience and emotions through ranges of colours and textures.

During lockdown she challenged herself to create art during the lonely nights; what emerged were gorgeous, bright and colourful “finger paintings” done on her iPhone Notes app.

She tells us more:

How did you start?

One sleepless night in 2020, another night in lockdown, I was listening to music on the floor and at around 2am I recalled a cheeseburger I'd drawn on an old iPhone. I felt enthusiastic about this challenge and opened the Notes app on my current phone and put thought to finger, and finger to screen. And here we are.

What's your creative process?

Overthinking. If I'm really being honest, that's where it always starts. My process starts with overthinking about totally non-creative things; emotional or numbing thoughts that eventually manifest in colours. Once I start thinking of colours, I attach a colour to a thought, and the thought to a picture. What the picture turns out to be is left to my fingers.

Since the improvements and updates on the iPhone operating system, the Notes app now has a full colour palette, pen, brush and pencil with adjustable stroke width and textures, and a great ability to play with colour opacities.

My mobile phone was transformed into a modern-day pocket easel, not confined to pages or places, so I can make something new anytime, anywhere. I use my fingers like a digital paintbrush, to challenge myself and to avoid the expenditure of a stylus. That's what makes this body of work more profound.

What inspires you?

God, colour, motion and movement, random thoughts, meaningless objects, eating, outside, childhood memories, emojis and human rights (or lack thereof). I love water and fire. I really don't like the colour pink. All my artworks mean something; most portray things I'd never say out loud to anyone. The stuff you keep hidden. That's what's so great about art — you can hide all your secrets in it.

I love what colour and motion do to a person in a painting or drawing. The mixing of subdued tones, with moody shades that seem to move, and then shocking strokes of colour overlaid, turns odd thoughts into something surprising. It wakes you up when you probably didn't even realise you were asleep inside.