Author Topic: Features for (more) dynamic Painting  (Read 2484 times)

tingham

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Features for (more) dynamic Painting
on: May 10, 2023, 08:38:53 AM


This is a bit of a large list but as I was painting this morning I realized that these are all things I've been thinking about for a while and I guess I should have sent each one over individually. I realize that I'm not that important and that these ideas are all speculative; and originate from a user (who is also an artist, known for flights of the imagination) but I do hope you'll consider them.

  •         Performance Brushes
            I'd like to be able to build a set of brushes that are meant to work in tandem.
            Each of these would make sure to not key dynamics off of a specific parameter from the Pencil (for instance Tilt)
            I would then like to combine these brushes as a separate brush and drive the switching between them with the curve generated by the Tilt (or other parameter) of the Pencil.
            Tilt here is an example, it might also switch based on any of the other available parameters (velocity, pressure) or the following new parameters (which may or may-not have applications outside of this feature)
           
    • Timing - Specified in milliseconds; the brush would alternate between brush selections (in Order, or by Random)
    • Per-Stroke - Whenever I lift the pencil to terminate a stroke, alternate between brush selections (in Order, or by Random)
            If color could be stored within each sub-brush all the better; it would allow for the simulation of front/back loading a brush succinctly.
  •         Pinned Colors
            Being able to offset the color palette to pin it is very nice. I believe that this can be taken further; to cover far more use-cases than just having access to "All the Colors"
            I'd like to specify a few colors from my existing palettes as pinned colors. When viewing these colors I'd like to see them as icons around the perimeter of a circle where the center point can be used to move them around.
            Often when I'm painting in a given session I'm focusing on two or three colors at a time. The present workaround is to have a palette that is meant to be a scratchpad where I'm constantly deleting colors and adding new swatches based on the current work. Having pinnable-colors would make this workflow a first-class citizen.
  •         Color Theme
            This feature is predicated on a couple of assumptions:
           
    • That the alternate color in a brush is a global setting
    • That alternate color could, relatively easily, support multiple colors based on context
            If we could specific a color theme per painting; I'd envision that as we're painting we could select a new alternate color based on the sample of the color under the brush. The selection of which alt-color from the theme would be done by finding the color from that set that is the closest linear distance from the current color in RGB space.
            By implementing this; we would ensure that the "current" alternate color is always one of those chosen from our "Theme" and also a more "pure" color than simply sampling that which is currently under the cursor. (More like a loaded brush and less like a stick used to stir up some mud.)
  •         Shape Insertion
            Years ago there was an application called Alchemy that did some really interesting thing with vector shapes to help in the concept generation stage of a painting. I'd love to be able to target a directory of (either raster art, black and white/grayscale) and have a brush mode that iterated through those resources using Pencil parameters to control scale/rotation, etc. To quickly build up a few forms to start working from.
            I suppose this could also be helpful for texture-bombing a painting with a given texture if we didn't limit it to just black and white resources.
  •         Adjustment tool layer sampling
            Sponge/Burn, etc need an option in the tools settings for sampling only the current layer, layers below, or all layers.
  •         Auto-hide reference viewer
            When I'm painting with a reference on screen, painting near the reference viewer should hide that viewer until I let up on the pencil.
  •         Noise generation inside of Wet: Mix application
            During the application of a wet mix, in addition to the current "Mix amount" slider, I'd like to be able to specify a noise value to use in the application of the dragged colors' application over top of existing/new paint.
            It might also be worthwhile to provide a scale parameter for the noise.
  •         Open transform tool
            When I select the transform-cross, I almost always expect that I can scale and rotate as well as translate.
            I think this makes sense as a default behavior.
  •         Mix-maximum application on parameters other than velocity
            Presently when driving mix to the far right of the slider bounds; the mix switches to Velocity.
            I'd like to be able to specify which parameter is used for the mix-maximum; either in that location, or in the Dynamics menu would work fine.
I really hope that these feature requests aren't too forward. I'm sure you all have your own ideas about where to take the application; it really is amazing as it is and I'm able to express myself a ton with what is presently available.

Whenever I see that there is an update posted to the application; I get excited about what kind of new tools might be available and any one of these would be awesome to see in any form.

Thanks for your time and consideration.