Making art on a mobile phone is one of those ideas that at first sounds way cool: Fresh from an afternoon nap, the Artiste heads into the color-drenched fields of Provence. Instead of lugging pads, pencils, and easel, however, she carries only her Nokia cellphone. And now, using only a manicured finger, she artfully captures the beauty of southern France in late summer.

Dream on. In practice, drawing or “painting” on hand-held devices usually produces images that are quite uninteresting, to say the least. Sure, it’s easy to drag your finger around on touchscreen to make colored marks on a simulated canvas, but more often than not, the results look childlike. And that’s not due solely to any lack of talent on the user’s part; most mobile drawing programs are essentially just a pack of rather crude crayons.

Which brings us to My Magic Pencil, a drawing app that seems to be endowed with a remarkable level of craft, experience, and finesse. Just look at the drawings shown here, which we made just minutes after installing the program and booting it up on a Nokia N97. No prize winners, for sure, but these sketches surprised us with their seeming nuance and texture. Their shading, in particular, has a delicacy that we’re not used to seeing from any computer-based art software, much less a 0.12MB piece of Java code running on a mobile phone.

Believe us, we’re all thumbs when it comes to drawing with pencil or charcoal. But based on our limited experience with those traditional media, My Magic Pencil is especially pleasing – and easy to use. First, you choose from any of several pencil widths. The smallest of these draws a very fine line, with no embellishment. (And here’s where the phone’s stylus comes in handy.) It’s in the fatter pencils that the app’s “magic” kicks in: As you draw, the software automatically fills in the corners where two lines meet or, if you go over a certain area enough, shades it darker and darker. And if you start with a fine pencil and then go over it with a thicker one, the results are especially realistic, looking less mechanical than worked by hand.

The apparent effect, as is clear even in the amateurish examples shown here, is of a fairly sophisticated drawing technique. The irregularity of the lines mimics what a real artist might do. And with some practice, we’ve found, it’s possible to control these automatic fill-ins, at least to a certain degree. But as we’ve also discovered, it can be fun to just see what happens as the program connects lines and shades corners on its own. As with all the best media, Magic Pencil is open to chance and serendipity.

Drawings are easily saved with the touch of a button or, likewise, retrieved from storage for further rendering. There’s an eraser, too, and an easy way to reposition the drawing surface, which is considerably larger than the touchscreen’s window. As far as built-in functions go, that’s about it.

That said, this app is hardly perfect. One flaw we discovered is that the code sometimes freezes – the result, it appears, of our overloading it with input from the touchscreen by moving our finger too fast in a small area. Unable to keep up, the program stops responding, and the only way to recover, it seems, is kill it – and thus lose any work done up to that point.

Some other improvements we’d like to see developers Efrac add to My Magic Pencil: The ability to zoom in on a selected portion of a drawing, so it can be worked on at a smaller scale. A way of adjusting the size of the eraser. An “undo” button. The ability to choose the folder where Magic Pencil stores its drawings. (In .BMP file format, each image is a hefty 1MB or more in size, and by default they get stored in the phone’s severely limited C: drive storage.) And finally, a way to start a new project, with fresh, clean canvas, without having to kill and restart the app from scratch.

This app is priced at $2.99 and runs on Nokia phones with a touchscreen. (Please note: The app is listed in Ovi Store under the “Photo & Video” category.)

The bottom line, so to speak: My Magic Pencil is a clever and delightful drawing tool with which even fumble-fingers can make intriguing, even impressive images, both abstract and representational. Don’t plan on quitting your day job, but this may be the app that finally releases that struggling artist who has been trapped inside you all these years.