Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software on July 14, 2012 at 8:44am

Could you talk a little about how you built up the features of the person in the painting. It's a real good balance of looking realistic while at the same time looking painted.

Comment by liveart on July 14, 2012 at 9:40am

great work, glad someone took up the challenge. nice set of splashy brushes

the other thing you got right that I skipped is the correct ratio of figure to canvas

all in all very successful

Comment by balaclava_man on July 14, 2012 at 10:41am

Thanks for the comments. The figure was built up with 7 or 8 different brushes. I first traced a black and white version of the photo with a pencil brush. Then I used 3 different but similar brushes that [are supposed to] simulate rotting pens to block in the darker areas. Once I was happy with the initial black and white drawing I dropped it into the background and started to work them together.I  swapped out the bw photo for a colour one and used another couple of brushes to add some spot colour; bikini, lips, face, little bit on the jeans. All of these brushes except the pencil one work on local image area, and with the pencil outline I knew where the areas I wanted to target were. So far its all hand painted. I ran a couple of scribble paint actions next and loved the squiggly white strokes against the black drawing on the right arm, so kept that and ditched the rest. I should mention that I save the stages I like and composite the bits that I want together. That was pretty much it for the figure. I painted the building in with another brush working on local image area and then went splash mad! It sounds like a plan but it's pretty much all improvised, building up in stages and responding to things that I feel work. SA is great for that. Source brushes can have the image source swapped out whilst working for example.

Comment by balaclava_man on July 14, 2012 at 10:44am

rotting pens! Oops. That should be rotring of course. Auto-correction!

Comment by liveart on July 14, 2012 at 11:24am

are the rotting (sic) pens presets that you designed? and which splash paints did you use... something is using a raptor as a nib.. very cool.

Comment by balaclava_man on July 14, 2012 at 11:59am

Hi Liveart

I have a 'large' collection of my own brushes now and don't actually use many of the supplied presets any more.Simply because I tend to run the 'mutate factory paint' option in gallery show quite often to see what comes up and it would take forever to get something I want if I loaded in everything. So yes I designed them, based on the russ mills examples I checked out after your challenge landed [lots of densely packed angularity]. I spent a couple of days throwing ink and paint around and scanned the best ones to use as image brushes, randomising the size, rotation angle and hue in a fairly small range, just to get slight variations. Now that I have those behaving as I want I can just swap the image as I paint. As for the raptors, I have to disappoint you. It is a diagram about bird flight I found on the internet, it's just been nicely blended into the picture by SA's amazing goodness.

Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software on July 14, 2012 at 12:10pm

Great example of using Studio Artist features to build your own custom paint presets!

And a great job of emulating the challenge's artistic style.

I missed the birds until liveart pointed them out. You could really take that concept and run with it. I do a lot of photo collage or photo mosaic imagery, but i haven't really explored too much the notion of paint strokes or paint nibs that are representational when you focus in on them. It's a whole different approach to the notion of painted photo collage, embedding the photos so it appears like a paint splatter on first glance.

Comment by balaclava_man on July 14, 2012 at 12:45pm

Thanks John

 Damn! That's a great idea. I see more time disappearing in front of SA! There truly does seem to be no end to the options in this programme. I suppose I am pretty lucky in having a very narrow focus. I have a background in print and mixed media and emulating that look digitally is something I've always been interested in. So the Russ Mills style is right up my alley. Thanks to liveart for bringing it up. I'd not seen this work before. This is my first run at it and there is more to try. Just as an aside to anyone interested in working with image brushes...I used HUGE resolution on the first ones I tried [with print in mind] and ran out of memory pretty quick. 5 undo's and then a crash! So compromise! The biggest I could get away with is 20Mb. Most are around between 1 and 5 now. 

Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software on July 14, 2012 at 1:35pm

If you do it as a movie brush you can choose the disk load option (as opposed to preload). That will use less memory since the entire movie isn't loaded into memory.

If the crash problem was related to undo of manual paint strokes when painting manually into a large canvas, there is a fix for that issue in 4.05. There's a memory leak in 4.04 for manual paint undo, which becomes noticeable when working with large canvas sizes. If you email techsupport AT synthetik DOT com we can email you the 4.05 app. We're going to be updating everyone very soon, we're waiting on an installer packaging issue for windows before we send it out to everyone.

Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software on July 14, 2012 at 1:38pm

The other thing to be aware of with image source brushes (or computational ones) is that the total brush cache is a set of images, based on the # of sizes times the # of orientations. These are all pre-computed and stored in a cache in memory. Since the number of sizes is multiplied by the number of orientations, the number of cached images can get large based on how you set those 2 numbers. So you might be using way more memory than you anticipate. By reducing either or both of those parameters you can cut back on cache memory consumption quite a bit.

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