So what is Studio Artist anyway?
It's a digital art program with a 20 year long history at this point. When Studio Artist V1 was released at MacWorld New York in 1999 (is that a long time ago or yesterday, i get confused), it was a pretty radical rethink of what a digital paint program could be. It was not PhotoShop, it was not Painter, it was not Illustrator, it was its own thing. With its own internal structure, its own way of working, its own way of thinking about how to work.
It allowed you to work with still images or video, merging those 2 very separate application categories at the time into one unified system. It introduced the concept of a 'source' and a working 'canvas', again a very unique distinction at the time. It introduced the concept of incorporating a human visual model (based on research into how the human visual cortex works at the neural level) into a graphics program for digital artists. It incorporated conceptual ideas from music synthesis, music synthesizers, and digital audio software, and then incorporated them into a digital art program for visual artists. It introduced a new hybrid raster-vector model for digital paint effects (bezier paths that define a drawing path, raster paint nibs that a relaid down on that editable vector paint path).
It also introduced what i call the first 3 levels of ways of working and interacting with digital imagery.
Level 1 is all about working at the pixel level. Down in the basement. Literally pushing pixels around on the canvas with an interactive stylus (wacom pen at the time) or a mouse cursor.
I would also consider the use of simple image processing effects (like an edge or blur filter) to be working at level 1 to some extent. At least for the sake of this discussion.
Level 2 moves up a conceptual notch with intelligent automatic actions. Intelligence based on the underlying human visual modeling built into the program. That takes a center stage in the Studio Artist paint synthesizer with its extensive use of visual attribute modulation internally. But intelligence that was also distributed throughout the program in a wide variety of adaptive image processing effects. Also based on visual attribute modulation.
Studio Artist is built from the ground up on the concept that the program tries to look at a visual 'source' just like a human artist would look at that 'source'. That internal visual representation is then made available internally throughout the program. Visually modulating what the paint synthesizer is doing, visually modulating what adaptive image processing effects are doing.
You can think of the 'source' as a model the artist is painting, or a photograph of a scene the artist is reinterpreting in a painting. The artist looks at the source to influence their work, but so does Studio Artist. Using its internal human visual modeling. Trying to perceive the source in a similar way to the artist perceiving it, reacting to it, etc.
This process is not about the machine replacing the artist. Far from it.
Studio Artist always tries to incorporate the human artist into the automatic action creative loop. At whatever level of interaction the artist is comfortable with. The artist can do all the work if they want to. Or the artist can manually manipulate the stylus, while Studio Artist intelligently assists in the manual drawing (intelligent assisted painting). Or the artist can press the Action button, and Studio Artist does all of the work automatically (fully automatic action painting).
But even in that last case of a fully automatic action, the artist is still involved in the loop, making decisions about what they like and don't like, how to proceed next, etc.
Level 3 in our taxonomy of ways of working i would define as working with scripts of actions (which could be manual or automatic actions). Studio Artist includes a Paint Action Sequence (PASeq) Editor, that allows you to build more expansive visual effects composed of multiple actions that work in sequence. Combining together different kinds of brush sizes, different kinds of digital media emulation, different kinds of artistic techniques (charcoal, ink pen, watercolor, water or acid wash, canvas smear etc) into a sequence of different processing steps that work together in synergy to build up a final visual effect.
Since automatic actions intelligently analyze the 'source', they can be built using just one specific image as the source when they are initially created, but then applied to an infinite variety of different source images later, while achieving the same stylistic visual effect output for those new input images as was designed using the first source.
Intelligent actions meant that you could also work at level 3 building PASeq presets in Studio Artist, and then process movies with them. Creating dynamic visual effects in processed movie files that looked like hand painted or hand animated art styles in moving art.
That was a lot of innovation introduced in old SA V1. Innovation that is still missing in other digital art programs 20 years later to be honest. I say that because in every other digital art program i sit down at, you start with a blank canvas, and then you have to do all of the work. The other programs do nothing, you have to explicitly make everything happen in them yourself.
Here's the thing, that's a really hard process to create something from nothing. Especially if you have not taken the extensive time and training required to develop the muscular and neural motor skills required to draw well. Some people are very good at it, many, many more are not.
Now there's a direct analogy in the world of music composition, where in the old days a composer would compose a piece of music (as marks on paper literally), and then go into a very expensive recording studio, and tell a bunch of musicians they hired at union scale wages to play their piece of music for them, and a recording engineer you also had to pay hourly would record them playing the music, and then another person you had to pay would mix and master the recorded tracks into a finished piece of music. And the expense and organizational complexity of all of this was really prohibitive to musical creativity.
So the home recording studio revolution created by digital audio workstation software running on personal computer hardware (a revolution i was heavily involved in created back in the day), was truly liberating for individual musicians and composers. Because they could do the work on their kitchen table if they wanted to, and they could do all of the work if they so desired themselves.
Studio Artist was trying to do a very similar thing in the visual art and digital video world. So that if an individual had a great idea for an animated film, they could do it all themselves on their kitchen table. As opposed to hiring a team of animators at great expense to make that happen.
David Kaplan pursed that very vision using Studio artist to great effect, winning an award at the Sundance Film Festival for his feature length Studio Artist animated film 'Year of the Fish'. Literally created at his kitchen table in his apartment in NYC.
And the innovation continued over the years as new versions of Studio Artist were released. Vector effects were introduced via the Vectorizer, new vector paint options in the paint synthesizer, and vector output from some Ip Op effects. You could output these new vector effects as resolution independent svg files, an interesting alternative to the traditional raster image file output.
Temporal image processing effects were introduced. These were great for processing video with time based effects, but also opened up a whole new way of working called 'stack filtering'. Stack filtering involves taking a collection of still images, and then using that collection of individual images as the input to temporal image processing effects. The end results can be visually amazing.
MSG (modular synthesized graphics) was introduced in SA V2, and has been extensively expanded over the years. With over 600 individual image processing and generative modular effects that can be used to construct an infinite variety of different modular preset effects. MSG can be totally generative (creating visual imagery from nothing but editable parameters), or it can process a source image into an effected output image, or a source can be used to modulate a generative process in some way internally.
MSG presets can also be embedded into the paint synthesizer, providing a way to modularly expand different internal paint synthesizer components (like path start generation, path shape generation, brush load processing, source brush generation). Studio Artist V5.5 also lets you embed Ip Op and Vectorizer effects directly into the paint synthesizer (once again super-charging what you can do with paint synthesizer presets).
Movie brushes (using a movie as a paint brush) were introduced fairly early on in Studio Artist history. Movie brush capabilities have expanded over the years with image folder brushes, as well as movie and image folder background textures. These can be incorporated along with visual attribute modulation to build photo mosaic and other visual effects built off of artist curated sets of multiple visual images loaded into a digital paintbrush.
Keyframe animation in the PASeq Timeline allows for the construction of interpolated hand painted strokes that then move dynamically over time in an animation, automatic dynamic visual transformations, morphing, warping, etc. Bezier paths derived from automatic actions can also be embedded into single paint actions and then key-framed as well on the PASeq Timeline.
So Studio Artist has always been a generative digital art system from its very beginning. And i want to draw a distinction between how the word 'generative art' is oftentimes used, because many artists use it to refer to digital art output from software coding systems created for artists like Processing, Open Frameworks, or perhaps mucking about in neural net Colab notebooks these days, etc.
I'm all for artists learning how to work with software code if they so desire. But my experience working with a lot of visual artists over the last 30 years indicates that many of them are not really interested in software coding. It requires a certain level of 'left brain' analytical thinking they aren't necessarily comfortable with (especially within their working methodology which is much more intuitive or 'right brain' in nature).
These 'left brain' - 'right brain' metaphors are much over-worked (and technically incorrect) at this point in time, but i think they are still useful on some level. We have traditionally made the distinction between 'left brain' building your set of tool presets, vs 'right brain' using your set of tool presets within the Studio Artist universe. So you would set apart specific times to build working tools (left brain activity), and then use those tools creatively in your artwork (right brain activity).
The previous distinction between these 2 ways of working ( 'building the tools and then 'using the tools' ) is a good lead in to where Studio Artist is heading. Both in terms of the new features we are introducing in Studio Artist V5.5, and where we see those new features heading in the future. Because we believe we have staked out a whole new way for digital artists to work in Studio Artist V5.5. And we are going to fully develop that out and expand the nature of what it truly means in future Studio Artist releases.
Studio Artist V5.5 introduces 2 whole new higher levels to our taxonomy of 'levels of working' for digital visual artists.
The 4th level of working involves expanding the whole concept of what the 'source' even means in a digital art program. Traditional digital art programs are very religiously rooted to the concept of working with a single image, a single movie file. The single digital photo you took, and you now want to enhance or effect in some way. The single movie file that you want to effect in some way. The empty blank canvas that you are supposed to turn into a sketch of a woman's face, or a bowl of fruit on a table.
So this new 4th level of working i call 'source abstraction'. Abstracting and expanding the whole notion of what the source even means. So that it is no longer tied to just a single image or movie file. It might be a representation of a collection of images, a collection of movies. You might start to think of it as more like a data model, filled with visual attributes, all available for modulation within Studio Artist.
You can also start to think about 'style' mixing in the context of the 'source'. Playing one abstracted 'source' off against another abstracted 'source'.
My personal viewpoint on the whole notion of what a source is, or even style for that matter, has evolved and expanded quite a bit over the years. Just like our notion of what the source is and can do has expanded in Studio Artist V5.5. With the new Gallery Show source options, and the new Load Style features. Both of which are really just teasers for even cooler things to come, but still incredibly useful in their current limited forms.
It's fascinating when you start thinking about the 'source' for a piece of artwork as being a collection of images instead of a single image. It's very much like working with a database of visual attributes. It's a very different way of thinking for most digital artists (at least that is my perception). Different, but really expansive, liberating perhaps, definitely worth getting a grasp on, worth trying out and exploring. It's new territory waiting to be charted out, waiting for you to find your own personal niche within it.
As i pointed out earlier, the Studio Artist universe dived into this water when we got heavily into stack filtering. But it's always existed since V1 if you really wanted to explore it, via loading a movie (which could be any old collection of images as individual frames within the movie container), and then riffing with it while painting.
I've been very heavily involved in getting up to speed on the latest developments in deep learning neural nets during this last pandemic year. Most people are probably unaware that i did neural net research in the 90s, including some very basic work on using convolutional neural networks for learning artistic stylistic transformations on images. Not really practical back then to be honest, so we quickly moved on to adaptive fuzzy logic systems and other things that ran a lot faster on the ancient computer hardware available at the time.
But it's a very different world now days. So it's been fascinating to take my background in all things neural net and bring it all up to date with the latest and greatest developments in the field. So i'm heavily influenced by what people have been doing with recent research areas like neural style transfer, generative models like GANs and VAE systems, etc.
And the notion of a database of visual images is very central to how these deep learning neural net systems work. Generative imaging transformations based on the collective visual statistical properties of a collection of images. So all of that exciting new research work has heavily influenced my thinking, and is going to continue to do so in the future as we move forward.
This whole notion of source abstraction (expanding the whole notion of what a 'source' even means), is the new 4th level of working.
And the 'build a tool' - 'use a tool' discussion mentioned earlier is really what the new 5th level of working hopes to alleviate.
Through the use of AI Generative Systems. Implementing automatic intelligent Generative Art Strategies.
The power of AI Generative Systems is that they can intelligently create presets for you on the fly. A literally infinite variety of them. And then they can intelligently work with multiple kinds of presets, working with them together in sequence to build more elaborate effects. More elaborate generative strategies.
So it's like scripting, except Studio Artist builds the script for you, automatically, on the fly, and it can always be different if you want that, even as it follows a generative strategy that is constrained in some high level conceptual way.
Or letting you define artistic strategies for it to explore for you automatically. Like that crew of really hard working people famous artists use to crank out their work for them.
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