compilerbitch | Artrage

Artrage

My CL roommate (

petebu) just showed me Artrage, a free paint application for Windows that models actual paint. As in oil paint. It is extremely impressive -- I tried it first on his tablet PC, then had a go on my own XP box that happens to have a separate graphics tablet attached to it. It is particularly good at tracing (of the by-hand rather than automatic variety), and can automatically pick up paint colours from the underlying image. The weirdest thing about it is that it seems to have a map of how much paint is on each pixel, and your brush is loaded only with a finite amount of paint too, so the colours mix on the paper the way they do with actual paint.

Try it, and at the risk of starting a meme, post the results in your LJ for all to see!

Full res version is here. The whole thing took about 5 minutes, with a tiny bit of cleaning up around the edges in Photoshop at the end.

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As soon as I get more disk space, I'm totally downloading it.

I really do think I need a tablet! Any recommendations?

I have Trust A5 tablet (bought from the Staples not far from where you live). Seems reasonably OK, though it's not as linear as I'd like it to be (diagonal lines drawn with a ruler look a bit wavy, but it's not generally an issue in normal use). I had a big A3 Wacom years ago that was fantastic (better than the Trust), but it cost big money. I've managed to do plenty of good stuff with the Trust, however -- it gets used a lot for my technical illustrations in papers and for my thesis, whilst also really making it a lot easier to process photos in Photoshop.