linux diary

Drawn in the Krita paint program.

These Linux programs feel "right" to me, slightly archaic, and pretty much the opposite of the iPhone painting apps where some genius technician devises an interface that you, the hapless consumer, uses to make quasi-Picassos or what have you. With the Linux programs, the open source work environments, mostly doped out in the 1995-2005 range (am guessing), and borrowing liberally from Adobe, are not so strongly branded as the the work of an individual creative designer (although they all have credits). A smudge tool is pretty much the same everywhere. The artist/user, then, has to find a balance between the dynamic or showy effects of the program's unique brushes and some kind of old fashioned notion of hand skill. One problem I had with the Chibi Paint program used by Computers Club Drawing Society was a shaky line, not because my hand is shaky but because the lack of stylus pressure made "normal" muscle twitches more obvious as the pen was gliding in a frictionless environment. Most of the Linux PC programs I'm using employ some form of weighted smoothing where an algorithm compensates for this. This may not come as news to Adobe painters but it's certainly not a feature of MSPaint. But then you have the "ethical" decision of how much compensation to use. A perfectly smoothly curving line seems like kind of a cheat -- a machine assist to make "every artist a Charles Burns" the way James Alliban makes you a regular Picasso. These kinds of decisions are interesting though -- cyber-age variations on the old issue of whether artists should use a standardized French curve or make "their own" curves (as some artist's handbook I once had posed the problem).

On a more mundane note: One nice thing about Krita is you can open multiple files and drag layers back and forth between them. I haven't figured out how to do this in GIMP, other than exporting the layers as images. Krita also has dot and stripe patterns that can be "brushed" -- again, maybe GIMP has these but I haven't found them.

Studio notes: I printed this out at 16 x 21 inches on 100% rag paper (full bleed, i.e., no border). The hard edges and solid colors of the curving pixel art lines give the printed image a certain "pop," as an object hanging on a wall, owing to the contrast between those sharply defined areas and the softer, photographic parts. It feels complete to me, not needing additional cutting or collaging. Possibly because so many of the texture decisions are worked out on the screen, and the printer is reproducing them faithfully.

Conceptually was probably influenced by Reneabythe's photo-comparison Cecily Brown vs Garbage Pix. Yes, there's a bit of "my kid could do that" sneering in those pairings but Cecily Brown kind of deserves it (her earliest work looked like copulating rabbit entrails but I'm not sure what it's supposed to be now -- bee yoo tee ful painting?). The art and technology website Rhizome.org is having a panel this week on "digital painting" (props to andrej and mirrrroring) but two topics they probably won't be discussing are (i) Cecily Brown vs Garbage (could this be the "new abstraction" they are talking about?) and (ii) Artists Who Have Finally Said F.U. to Apple and Windows and Are Switching to Linux. Those would be my salon des refusés topics.

Drawn with Linux MyPaint.
I still haven't found a brush I like as much as the Chibi Paint "watercolor" brush.
There is a kind of a fine balance where a digital brush pulls the paint and where it is just smearing or blurring it.
The ideal brush for me would simultaneously be loading color and pulling it away from an adjacent mark, and actually looking like a brushstroke without obviously or self-consciously imitating physical media.
Most of the "blend" brushes in MyPaint just dissolve, so everything resembles the Photoshop smudge tool, an effect I dislike.
Here I am compensating by crosshatching, so a volume is built up with fine lines of gradually lightening or darkening color.
The Microsoft Paint brushes in the Windows 7+ versions don't have any dissolve function at all -- they are all very "scratchy." I ended up getting my best results with the "colored pencil," which had a softer, semi-transparent line.
It's hard being a primadonna in a world where the digital tools are conceived by engineers. "Hey ottist I made a brush for ya!"