A shy child growing up in a musical family, her parents enrolled her in painting classes when group piano lessons proved too much of a social ordeal.

Since childhood, Mischief creator Sarah Frisken has straddled the boundary between art and science. And even its creators don’t know exactly how you’re going to use it. It’s a sketching tool that’s equally at home with note taking and mind-mapping. A $25 app now developed by a company with a background in thousand-dollar visual effects software, its underlying technology is used not just in graphics software, but Kindles and mobile phones. An artist’s tool created by a research scientist, it arose out of collaboration with both knee surgeons and Disney animators. Right from the start, it was clear that Mischief wasn’t going to be any ordinary drawing package. Main image: Artwork created in Mischief by James Paick, Ryan Dening, Shaddy Safadi and Wojtek Fus.

One year and over 80,000 downloads later, we explore how Mischief has evolved, what currently makes it unique – and the role that ArtStation users can play in the software’s future development. Last June, The Foundry acquired Mischief, a little-known but highly intriguing new digital sketching app.

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