Interactive Action Painting

[johndalton]

A while back there were a few forum posts that discussed people's desire to bring back the global evolution paint synthesizer features in version 4. And in some recent forum discussions there's been some posts talking about interactive gestural interfaces for audio synthesis. Both of these discussions inspired me to get to try out a few ideas. What's falling out of these experiments is that there's really a whole new way to work with Studio Artist for painting that i had not thought all that much about before, which i'll call interactive action painting for lack of a better descriptive term.

So traditionally, you could setup a paint preset in Studio Artist and then press the action button and watch it paint. Or you could build something like an auto-draw interactive or particle pen mode paint preset and it would auto-draw as you controlled it in real time with a mouse or wacom pen in the main draw canvas. Synthetik has traditionally called this second approach intelligent assisted drawing.

Studio Artist 4 added a new approach to action painting, which is the live manipulation of individual paint parameters in real time as action painting is taking place. So you can press the action button and then start adjusting different paint synthesizer settings in the Editor window and watch the auto-painting change appropriately in real time as you make those adjustments. You can view this live interaction as a great way to edit paint presets since you can see the results of your editing changes in real time. But you can also view it as a different way to approach the overall process of building up a final painting. And notice that the live user interaction is taking place in a secondary interface area (as opposed to taking place directly in the main draw canvas).

Morphing between different paint presets in real time is an extension of this notion of live editing. And again, you can view it in different ways. It can just be a great way to interactively edit a preset while it's drawing as an aid to getting the look and feel of it to be what you want. Or, you can view it as a new feature for interactively building up a painting in real time. You're using gestural interaction in a window separate from the main draw canvas (a preset morphing window in this case) to influence auto drawing in the main canvas. So rather than your pen movements defining the actual paint strokes, the pen movements can be thought of as gestures in a separate control surface area that influence the appearance and behavior of the auto painting taking place in the main draw canvas.

So as i work to finish up these new features i thought i'd start up a forum discussion about this whole notion of using gestural interaction in a separate control surface area to control auto painting in the main draw canvas. So feel free to make your suggestions about how you would like to see these new features develop. Or if you do't understand what i'm talking about i can try and explain more.

I think that this whole notion of gestural control of automatic painting can be taken much further than my initial thinking. So as i finish up the live preset morphing features we can perhaps work out in this forum discussion what some other interesting gestural interactions might be.

What's great about digital art tools is that we don't have to be restricted to what has come before in traditional art media. And this new way of working with Studio Artist that i'm describing here is a great example of that.

[johndalton]

Maybe what we're discussing in this post is a way to get to what you want to do, or at least a part of what you want. The notion of having live interactive control over an auto painting process. So then rather than experiencing the monolithic nature of a particular auto paint preset as it runs, you could dynamically bend it to your will and change what it's doing in real time as it paints.

[johndalton]

You mentioned that action all over the place gets boring to you. Have you tried working with region selection to restrict auto-painting to specific areas of the canvas? Or do you feel you need some other mechanism for this that is more fluid?

[liveart]

I see where you might be going with this. I currently use pentrack as a method for controlling the area that a loop or auto run preset draws in. But a gestural way to select areas while we are drawing or auto painting could be interesting

[Florence Artur]

No, I've never explored region selection. Maybe I should!

But when I said it gets boring, I wasn't thinking about it as a flaw, really. I like auto paint, especially now that I can change the settings as the action runs. (Which I should probably play with more, now that I think about it. So far I have only tried changing the color.) It's just not something I want to use too much, or not exclusively anyway. And I would love to use it simultaneously with manual painting at times, as I said.

[Donna Kuhn]

noting the overwhelm factor, you are missing a lot of fun ignoring msg and image opps

[Thorrific]

Florence, I think if you gave dual mode or loop mode features a try for a while you might really enjoy them... MSG is really amazing too when you get into it, and you can run the MSG patches through your brushes using the paint brush load in the paint synth, so you can greatly expand the kinds of looks you can get from the paint presets! I know it can be a little overwhelming/intimidating at first, but you can't break anything so I would say just play around with them for a while and you might find that you actually like those features.

[Donna Kuhn]

to me the paint synthesizer is more difficult because i don't use it as much. i can't seem to get used to no canvas or paper although i'd love to not have a mess to clean up after painting.