Color Mixing

[Synthetik]

After watching someone do some real physical painting at a gallery in Hawaii this weekend i've been thinking about some ways to add some more live paint palette mixing features to Studio Artist.  

There are of course already things you can do now where you can use a specific layer for mixing color, do a live brush load capture from that mixing palette, and then switch back to your main painting layer.  So you can load a brush with 2 or more colors and then paint with that brush load. You can also emulate those kind of spatial brush color loading effects using the Fixed Color modulators in the paint synthesizer and things like the gradient brush loading features. 

But what struck me during my observations yesterday is that there's an interesting characteristic of tacky paint mixing involving multiple colors that would be interesting to emulate.  It's very dependent on the kind of paint that's being used.  For example, watercolors mix very differently than blobs of oil paint.  

What's interesting about tacky oil paint is that there appears to be very little diffusion going on between adjacent colors on the mixing palette or on the brush, the mixing is very much driven by applied pressure and associated smear, otherwise the paint application acts more like an image warp that maintains distinct solid colors. At least that was one of my take home observations.

I think there are some modifications we could add to the paint synthesizer to aid in reproducing these kinds of color mixing effects.  But i thought i'd open up a discussion here so that people can chime in with additional suggestions.  We've had suggestions before about adding a color palette mixing area, but other than wanting a separate area to do it in no one really gets specific about the physical details what is going on in live paint mixing for some specific media type that they want to take advantage of. So those kinds of suggestions or observations are what i'm more interested in hearing about.

[liveart]

YES YES YES... please do this. Not just in a separate palette. I would love to have more physics in the mixing of the paint on the canvas. Watercolors that bleed and mix and spread and flow; inks that react as if there was capillary action or if into wet, as if the were being dropped into water... Oils that mixed as if spilled, or as if poured carefully in layers and then have a brush handle dragged through them.

[Synthetik]

In some sense i think that the existing dual mode paint functionality can go a long way towards modeling the physics of mixing for things like water color paint. Remember, you can have a dual process going on in the paint preset itself while combined with an additional image processing operation in dual mode operation mode for emulating the spreading or wet paper effect.

Certainly more than have been explored at this point, that part of Studio Artist 4 has barely begun to be explored.

I don't want to dismiss that kind of wet mixing, it's often what people think about when discussing this kind of thing. But what struck me as i stood and watched someone use real physical paint squeezed out of tubes onto a mixing palette and then applying it to the brush was how little wet mixing took place on it's own. The paint itself seemed very rigid, 2 colors next to each other don't really mix at all on their own. It was all about how the artist uses the brush to make the 2 pigment colors mix. through application of pressure and twist tilt in the brush while drawing the stroke.

[Thorrific]

I have Painter 8 on a computer somewhere (haven't used it in years), and it has floating window that was an artist's palette or mixing board and you could mix colors with a "brush" or "palette knife" and get a very physical interactive mixing of colors, and then you "dabbed" your brush into your "paint mix" where you wanted in the color mix, and then painted on the canvas. When painting, the paint that was applied with the brush represented the way the particular striations and mixxey whorls of the paint of the way you had dipped your brush into the paint on the palette (depending on how much you had mixed the colors on the mixing palette). It would be great to have something like this kind of thing in SA. Hope this makes sense!

[Synthetik]

You already have this. It's called mixing colored paint in a second layer, and the capturing a piece of the canvas using the BrushLoad Capture feature. You then can paint with the particular striations and mixxey whorls of color you created in your mixing layer onto the main canvas paint layer.

You need to switch between a brush that works normally as a wet paint brush for mixing the colors in your 'palette' layer. And then use a different paint preset that works off of the BrushLoad Capture buffer to paint into the main canvas.

Holding down the a hotkey and mousing down into the canvas captures a brush load buffer image. And the BrushLoad buffer is accessible in the Paint Brush Load control panel as a source for things like the image processing brush load function.

[Thorrific]

cool thanks John!

[Synthetik]

The other thing to mention, is that the Fixed Color features available in the paint synthesizer via the Fixed Color control panel and the various places you can use Fixed Color 1 and Fixed Color 2 as color sources provides a way to emulate the kinds of effects you could get by using a paint mixing palette to combine together 2 different paint colors on a brush. In some sense it's easier to use once you have the presets built because the Fixed Colors can be setup to track the current source color as offsets. So you can build various color gradient or mixing presets that are color independent. If you manually do the combination of the 2 colors it involves a lot of manual work, while the fixed colors can be setup to automatically track the source color. There's usually some kind of color theory reasons why you are putting two different colors together in a paint stroke, and Fixed Colors can do that computationally automatically from a single source color choice.

Studio Artist 4 also lets you directly access the first 2 source area color memories in the paint synthesizer. SO you can manually build your color combinations in the source area using those color memories if you wish and then draw with them via Fixed Color routing in the paint synthesizer.

[Jean Detheux]

Before the mixing palette was introduced in Painter (have had all versions since v. 4), I would open two canvases/images at the same time and use one as a mixing palette, using the color picker to pick from that and paint away on the other canvas.
I have Painter 11 now, possibly the best Painter to date.
All the images in "Taïga Maya" (the DVD/CD/book box-set will hit the shelves on October 12) were made with Painter, while its animated sequences were done in SA and Final Cut Pro.
Here's an example of a Painter image in that project:

I sure would love it if SA allowed for opening more than one image at a time, and/or made the source image palette much larger.

[Synthetik]

We could allow the source palette to be resized as desired. It's constrained now because it would autosize based on different content and get bigger than my personal tastes think is reasonable since when it does that the available canvas area gets smaller. But i could make it a preference option if people are interested. Tien (one of our old beta testers) has argued for years that you need a much larger surface area for the color picker part of it. He has a whole theory on why that is important.

You can use a source context PASeq action step to record a bunhc of different source images in keyframes and click on them to switch arround between source images quickly. Or drag and drop from a folder on your desktop to change as desired on the fly. Or use the recent source menus to do the source changes.

And of course the whole point of the stack filtering discussions going on here involves encoding a stack of different images as a single source movie. So you can load as many as you want that way.

[Jean Detheux]

The possibility to have the source image large enough to zoom in on small details while working from it would be very good. It would be nice to have the source image and the canvas opened side by side (or, in my case, have one on a monitor, the other on another one).
Using dual monitors (I have 4 at the University of Montreal right now;-) would allow for a large source image palette while retaining much of the other palettes, and still have a large canvas on the other monitor.
I routinely work with multiple source images (I remember having written a tutorial on that very topic years ago), but what I would like to see is different: it is simply a way to have the source image opened large "next" to the image being worked on on the canvas.
Think of the source image being identical to a still-live/model in a traditional context.

As for Tien, he was my student at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco (was "College" then, not yet "University") but I have not heard from him in ages. and my link to his web site no longer works.
Is he still on this forum?

[liveart]

I believe, that while computationally complex, the best way to model these things is within a 3d environment. The liquid and solids mechanics would be different but essentially extensions of the same equations with different values in some of the parameters. BTW in the layered paint scenario that I described above the paints/colors do not blend either. Each stays distinct except perhaps at the level of boundary turbulence, again depending upon how you pull your brush.