The Foundry, provider of creative software used by leading artists and designers, expanded its market reach while simultaneously bolstering the strength of its technology by acquiring
Made With Mischief
. The company’s flagship product, Mischief, is a pen-based sketching application for Mac and Windows.
Mischief blends sophisticated underlying technology with an elegant, clean interface. This makes it easy for creative people to explore, create and share art in a digital format on an infinite canvas while preserving the emotional experience of the physical.
Under the terms of the private deal, Made With Mischief, founded by Sarah Frisken, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of The Foundry. The company will be headquartered in Boston, with team members located in Boston, London and Shanghai.
Mischief is powered by a patented shape representation, known as Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields (ADFs), co-invented by Frisken. ADFs have several advantages for creative applications: they provide high-quality stroke rendering; they are amenable to hardware-based rendering so drawing is extremely responsive; they are very compact, resulting in small file sizes; they can be scaled without introducing pixelation artifacts; and they can accurately represent much richer and more complex shapes than traditional vector-based stroke representations.
For Frisken, the acquisition of Made With Mischief by The Foundry enables her to retain her core vision of providing high-quality software tools for wide range of artists and to preserve its accessible price point, while bringing future versions of the platform to an even broader audience.
In the new organization, Frisken will become chief scientist, allowing her to explore the convergence of technology and art in future innovations. She will work closely with Cheung to drive the conceptualization, development and commercialization of digital artistic solutions.
Users can purchase the full version of Mischief on the Mac App Store and the Mischief online store for $25. The full version of Mischief includes a full color panel with customizable color swatches, customizable brushes and hotkeys, and a selection of background papers and colors, all on Mischief’s infinite canvas.