How to blend smoothly using oil brush?

[byroncallas]

Hi Byron, fixed the video and here is another correlated video.

LOL: Lima: Well, I think maybe my post wasn't much related to what you were trying to show in your videos. I should delete it before I'm laughed out of the forum.

Of course we'll need Matt&Team to say: but the two videos blending with the smudge tool and switching to the flat knife looks like a bug. I can replicate it here exactly, instantly. I thought it might be your tool settings. But I can replicate it with most any of the flat knife and smudge tool settings with a little more or less manipulation of the paint. Terrific illustration. Let's see what the Ambient technical team has to say (?). EDIT. I suggest you post the anomaly videos in technical support, because I think you've found a bug. (?)

And the black-blend example is divine - an example of AR being rather impressive to get such a clean black. Nice job old boy.

[Lima]

Hi Byron, thanks for the input. Being pragmatic: viscous oil paints are moved around and mixed with the soft knife in a sort of extrusion pattern. The mixing behavior seems to be different from the mixing done with the knife blending tool, which has a kind of negative anti-extrusion pattern.


I really don't know if there is a bug or not. It might be related with software program, things that we don't understand such as stack flow, layers, pipeline, rastering, and things alike.


Interesting is that when you move the paint, any oil color paint, against the white background canvas occurrs a sequential tinting of the hue (Why?). The opposite, shading, does not occurs.


However the original pigment is there in all phases of this tint sequence. That can be shown using the blending knife... observe this... nonloaded blending knife... that rescues the original employed hue... but oddly the knife continues moving the paint along as if it where loaded (Why?). Even more interesting it moves on the stack the other colors pigments automatically, without sampling the changed hue (Why?).

Will post some photos about this.

take fare friend

[byroncallas]

Lima, I might well be wrong, but I believe the answer to of those "why" is a bug. I can see explanations why it might NOT be one, but it looks suspicious. I suggest to query in the technical forum and am pasting my illustration there along with a link to your video here. Now I'm curious and would like to understand one way or the other.
EDIT: Here is the link to the incident report. http://www2.ambientdesign.com/forums...922#post441922

[Lima]

Byron, nice of you to take the discussion to the technical forum.


Hi! I think IMHO that this is the soft to learn (and teach) color mixing. Mixing and blending colors with the flat knife tool, gives one the visual sensation of manualy making it, for real!!!

The use of a viscous paint would increase this feeling. Digital paint viscosity is being researched by many...

one example:
https://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~geom/papers/documents/dissertations/baxter04.pdf

well, AR has this kind of viscous paint. Viscous paint this is the point with this post. I than started to experiment with the soft knife tool. These experiments are momentaneously focused on color mixing. There seems to be many possibilities, and also different findings that where not seem before.

... continues on the technical forum

[byroncallas]

Hi Lima.

I recall reading Baxter's dissertation several years ago. It was published in 2004. While still relevant in its principles, the technologies he had available to him I imagine, after nine years, are supplanted by greater opportunities. But I'm not aware to what degree anyone has taken advantage of them.

The dissertation, while long, reflects the two main points I was suggesting in the post above: the Holy Grail of a digital painting program mimicking real tools must satisfy two criteria: 1) It must feel like real media during the process of applying paint; and 2) the results must be the same. I mentioned that it couldn't be accomplished without addressing hardware components. It is not just a programming challenge. It is a physical tool- building challenge that encompasses software integrations. In principle and practice, Baxter's dissertation had that singular product-development focus.

I don't know whatever happened to Baxter. I understand he sold some kind of patent to Microsoft around 2010. I don't know what the patent covered. I lost track of him. I'm not inside the industry. I'm no connected guy. I don't know if Baxter or others have moved the marble forward in some substantial way in the direction that Baxter envisioned. I've no idea if the technology requirements are anywhere near where they need to be to satisfy his core objective. The guys at Ambient Design are probably more up to date, by leaps and bounds, on related developments and directions.

As time passes one wonders if a vision like Baxter's can be successfully (profitably) pursued. As younger generations are introduced to digital painting programs, including great ones like ArtRage that they can begin to explore at two or three years of age, it is fair to ask if the Holy Grail Baxter envisioned is a sensible pursuit. It isn't unfair to ask if younger generations might fairly say, as would you and I, "I am not interested in an automobile that feels like driving a horse and buggy. I want a vehicle that allows me to go much farther, much faster, with more comfort and less cost."

You and I are born to an earlier environment where we might be forgiven our nostalgia. But younger generations may lack interest and prefer, instead, a really fast car, or an interplanetary space rocket.

I wish I were going to be around a couple of hundred years from now to see how it all turned out.

[Steve B]

I agree with this concept in many ways. I remember a contentious conversation with M.Aster in my Watercolor WIPs thread, where he asked "Why should we want our digital watercolors to look like natural media, when it's not?" A valid question. I don't care for watercolors that try to look and act like Oils. I like watercolors that really play with water. Similarly, perhaps younger generations will paint digitally, and will think "I don't want digital art to act like [insert various natural mediums here], I want it to act like digital art."

My issue has been that I have a hard time really thinking about what "digital" art looks like, beyond pixel art. Digital art lives in a physical vacuum unlike any kind of art previous to it, IMO. Other forms of art are largely dictated by the limitations and opportunities provided by the various media they are made of. Oils are opaque and viscous, watercolors wet, transparent, and granular, etc. What is digital art?

In a thread many months ago, someone mentioned that importing granular watercolor backgrounds to a digital watercolor seemed valid-- not because digital watercolors should look just like its natural media counterpart, but because all the world is made of texture and variety, and all art should have that, digital or otherwise. This makes me wonder- if part of what makes digital art digital art the fact that you can import anything and everything? I don't know. But its element of textural pastiche (much like modern artists sampling songs) is part of what seems to make it special.

Anyways, this is really, really tangential, but your comment sparked this thought, and I thought I'd share. I wonder-- what does make digital art digital art, and not simply a bad copy of something else? I would imagine that kind of vision will come, perhaps, some day, from younger artists who learn to paint digitally and never think twice about it, and end up not wanting "a car that acts and looks like a horse and buggy", as you so elegantly put it!

[byroncallas]

Steve,

It seems a terrifically valid contemplation. Maybe one way of getting at a perspective is to take a point you made and focus on one word in it, i.e. "opportunity". You said:

"Other forms of art are largely dictated by the limitations and opportunities provided by the various media they are made of. Oils are opaque and viscous, watercolors wet, transparent, and granular, etc. What is digital art?"

Digital art, at least compared to previous media, removes the word "limitations". By comparison, digital art presents nearly limitless opportunities. What we can do is subject only to the limits of our imagination and skill. With enough fiddling, we can make a piece look like anything we want. Digital art, in that context, is an art medium that allows the artist to imagine a desired outcome that can look like any other medium, or something no other medium has ever made possible, and with skill and perseverance, achieve it. In the most skillful hands, using any number of printing techniques available, observing a painting at a typical viewing distance, the viewer may not be able to discern how it was produced. He won't know if it is digitally produced or not, unless of course it is something not likely possible to produce by any of the normally recognized "real" media, though it is pretty astounding what people can do with "real" media.

Another way to think of digital art is as a watershed or transforming event in a cultural convention. People who live during a transformation live with an experience of what was. You and I are living through a transformation. We are inclined, having the past as a visceral experiential reference, as well as a nostalgia for it, to be almost compelled to ask in the context of your statement, "What is digital art?" But people born on the other side of the transformation, growing up with digital art all around them, would not think to ask the question. Someone reading our forum exchange 100 years from now might be astonished that people used to think like you and me, similar to when as a child I read that they used to try to cure diseases by bloodletting.

Those of us who have an investment in the media we spent some time learning to love and master are likely inclined to ask new things to validate our investment rather than to suggest that we may be obsolete. This may be the source of passionate defenses as well as denigrations. But when our generation is long gone, those passions will have gone with us just as the passions of the old Linotype unions in the late 1960's are non-existent when then, people were prepared to shoot people walking across picket lines to run the first cold type machines at major newspaper corporations. I was there for those encounters. Hardly anyone even remembers it now. In retrospect it seems absurd that such passions existed and such events took place.

This might seem a flight of fancy (???). But I think each of these is somewhere in the ballpark even if not home runs. I suppose a simple way of saying it is that we are bound, by human nature, to cling to those things we identify with, and that in many ways identify us. Something that comes along that challenges our identity, and for many people their livelihood, can be befuddling and threatening. My view is that we are in the midst of a technological transformation in how art is produced. It is sweeping aside all past conventions. In another two generations the shift will be accomplished. There won't be people living who would think to have the conversation that you and I are having here. They will be worried that people have found the technological means to simply think of an art idea and have it magically appear on a screen. There will be those who will argue it is not really art because they didn't use a stylus or a touch screen to generate the image.

I know this waxes a bit philosophical. But I suspect standing back, looking with some distance, these notions touch on the discussions about digital vs. real media that sometimes raise the passions. Reasonable people might stand back and wonder what is making the blood so hot. Young people don't have time to be bothered. They are out there doing incredible new things with incredible new things.

Masa mana,
: - )
b

[Someonesane]

The end result is all that matters to me. I could wake up tomorrow and find that my favorite type of oil paints are no longer available. What then? Stop painting, because the rest of paint doesnt flow the same way, or adapt to meet my new criteria? The tools only become relavent, when an artist makes use of them. Experiment with what's at hand and write your own rules. That is art.

[Steve B]

That's interesting to hear, SOS. Are you a working professional, as an artist?

I ask because, to me, as a non-pro, I would say that process is paramount. If I don't enjoy the process of making art, the rest doesn't matter at all. Additionally, for me, the tools I use to make an image are absolutely part of the process. So, I would say that the _experience_ of using Acrylics on a big mural, or watercolors on a stretched piece of paper while painting outside, or working digitally at a desk matters to me, most definitely. I admit I often find myself less interested in an image once I've made it. The result matters to me, but not as much. It's the making that I find exciting.

Simultaneously, I would say the _way_ in which you view a work matters as well. On a 10" computer screen? On a 20' tall mural at a restaurant? Mounted on a wall a living room wall? Resting on someone's desk? Absolutely, I would say, the _way_ in which I would view it would matter, and change my experience.

I guess my point is that the image isn't the only thing that matters. The how of it matters too-- both in the making and viewing of.

I could wake up tomorrow and find that my favorite type of oil paints are no longer available. What then? Stop painting, because the rest of paint doesnt flow the same way, or adapt to meet my new criteria? The tools only become relavent, when an artist makes use of them. Experiment with what's at hand and write your own rules. That is art.

True, but if your favorite paints went away, the way you painted would need to change, and probably the final image too. Of course you wouldn't stop making images, but I think it's a valid point to people can grow to like making an image in a certain way, that it gives them pleasure.

You like a certain hamburger made at your favorite restaurant. It goes out of business. Are you going to stop eating hamburgers? No. But that doesn't mean you won't miss your old favorite hamburger, and that you might not hunt out a new hamburger that tastes similar.

[chinapete]

This thread is fascinating and contains many useful tips and techniques for all sorts of painting traditional and digital ... Many thanks to everyone for their remarks and insights, I've learned a few new things about digital painting, and ArtRage ...


I am sure no one will disagree that the discussion is Western-centric ... I say this with the greatest respect for our tradition, no other culture has a similar history of continual creative innovation -- among them oil painting itself, various methods for the mechanical reproduction of images, all kinds of ingenious forms of analytic and synthetic perspective, revolutionary ideas such as art for art's sake, abstract art, conceptual art and so on ...

Yet it is interesting to reflect that from the Chinese perspective, art looks a little different ... The objective of most Western artists, even into the modern era, is to map artistic representation to a visible aspect of reality -- and generally speaking, the more closely the representation is mapped to reality, the higher the praise for the artist ... So there is much concern about shading, about getting the shape of the thing right ... And that is what, I think, the OP was looking for, and the replies have been helpful, even while exposing limitations in the current digital state-of-the-art ...

In this regard, most digital art I see, especially the kind that self-consciously eliminates any reference to natural media, reminds me of the ancient Chinese painter who was asked by the emperor, What is the hardest thing to paint? Horses and dogs, he said ... Why? Because everyone can see these things and it is known how they should look in a painting ... What then is the easiest thing to paint? Ghosts ... Why? Because no one has seen them, and therefore everyone can have an opinion about what they should look like ... So the amusing thing about most digital art is that it takes a ghost -- let's call this "imagination" -- and renders it with hyper-realism ...

But this form of realism is alien to the traditional Chinese artist ... In certain styles of calligraphy and ink painting, the only reality to be reproduced is the artist's presence ... Truth in painting is established when the painter is able to express the totality of the actual moment when something was perceived, felt, interpreted and reproduced ... There is no lag time, all happens instantaneously ... In the highest forms of calligraphy, the basic brush stroke is the only truth, and often the content of the written character (what the character "means") is treated as secondary or of no importance at all ...

For this reason, as I see it, the litmus test, the real Turing test of digital art, must be the ability to reproduce a basic brush stroke in Chinese calligraphy or ink painting indistinguishable from a human being performing the same act ... The test is incredibly simple: All that is needed is the means to control direction, pressure, opacity of ink, tip and side of brush in a single stroke, on paper that is textured and absorbent -- and after each stroke, to have the brush return to its original shape, with that much less ink, ready for the the next stroke ...

More than thousand years ago, a simple brush stroke of ink on paper or silk, when executed properly, was recognized as having "litigan" (立体感) -- the phrase means "three-dimensionality" ... As with most concepts in Chinese art, it is difficult to translate, but in relation to brushwork in calligraphy, it denotes the roundness that results from the interaction of one medium (ink) with another (paper), and also the force or energy of the artist's character ... It is this third dimension that is missing in digital art, and it is the reason why, after more than a year of experimenting with all the wonderful tools that AR and other digital software offer, I have increasingly turned to digital mixed media as the basis for my art -- I want to preserve the sensual feel of a brush resisting and stimulating each stroke, and at the same time, I want to create something that cannot be reproduced, digitally or otherwise, because that moment has passed ...

Apologies to the OP, as what I've just said no doubt strays very far from his or her immediate problem ...