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Description
I - didn't think my Email would be that accessible to others. THANK YOU everyone who wrote me (I think ...)

HOKAY, so =YOU= want to write your own program to look like you worked on a painting for hours. No, I'm not going to share my sourcecode or program with you, but I =WILL= tell you how to write your own and what's involved.

First off you may be thinking, well, I'll just take a JPEG, read in the pixels in my programming language and draw it back on the screen with a scribbly brush. I'm done, right ?

Yes and no. =YES= because you have the right idea, =NO= because it won't look right.

Why ?

Quite simply, all artwork, paper really, is WHITE. In order to paint the color white on white paper you draw NOTHING. Therefore, in order to write a program that makes others THINK you drew it with a colored pencil or charcoal or what have you.

You must start with a WHITE page and BLACKEN the colors around it, not lighten, which is, unfortunately, the opposite and default of all programming languages to alpha brighten images together until they are white (like some of those cool star effects you see in videogames). THIS TIME, You need the opposite.

I'm not that good a programmer so I screen capture my work and then bring it into Paintshop Pro and NEGATE the image. For this picture, I didn't resize it and I left the icons at the bottom to show you I'm negating the whole entire 1024x768 screen, but you SEE that it definitely looks like it was sketched by hand BECAUSE the ink is BLACK, not white, and =YES= that is critical to make it look absolutely correct.

And for this particular picture, I added a few human elements fudging the sourcecode, the brush jitters it's angle a bit as it sketches and for each pixel it scans, there's a 1% chance of it getting too dark all of a sudden and then trying to correct itself by not painting enough later, to add a more human element to it.

Naturally for the other art I've done, I use different coding techniques. I wanted this one to be simple.

The reason I must invert the screen is the cursed little language, BlitzMAX, while it definitely has the ability to do ALPHA (brightness) effect and if you 'strengthen' the brush you get white, you can't do the reverse, you can't add black to black and somehow get shades of black, even if you start with a white page. That woulda saved me some thinking time but the negative effect does work after all.

So I thought about this for a moment and realized I had to write my program BACKWARDS. Where it creates a negative image starting with black paper and then airbrushing in using the standard brush technique which creates LIGHT but the RESULTS have to be a perfect negative of the image I worked with since in this case light is black and black is light and I plan to reverse it later giving the effect of a brush that darkens.

Then in Paintshop Pro I NEGATE the entire image itself before saving, and tah-dah ! You have the effect of the paintbrushes NOT looking like LIGHT elements but as DARK elements, in this case, INK, or map pencils, and therefore looks like human elements were involved.

That's how you do it ! And of course then you can make all kindsa interesting brushes and ways of doodling them in.

I hope this will stop the repetitive questions in my Email although I DO appreciate your enthusiasm on my method. Now go and write your own already !

Tools: Paintshop Pro 7, BlitzMAX

(Gallery)

As with all my work, both artistic and literary, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to enter them below and I will be more than happy to respond.

Description
I - didn't think my Email would be that accessible to others. THANK YOU everyone who wrote me (I think ...)

HOKAY, so =YOU= want to write your own program to look like you worked on a painting for hours. No, I'm not going to share my sourcecode or program with you, but I =WILL= tell you how to write your own and what's involved.

First off you may be thinking, well, I'll just take a JPEG, read in the pixels in my programming language and draw it back on the screen with a scribbly brush. I'm done, right ?

Yes and no. =YES= because you have the right idea, =NO= because it won't look right.

Why ?

Quite simply, all artwork, paper really, is WHITE. In order to paint the color white on white paper you draw NOTHING. Therefore, in order to write a program that makes others THINK you drew it with a colored pencil or charcoal or what have you.

You must start with a WHITE page and BLACKEN the colors around it, not lighten, which is, unfortunately, the opposite and default of all programming languages to alpha brighten images together until they are white (like some of those cool star effects you see in videogames). THIS TIME, You need the opposite.

I'm not that good a programmer so I screen capture my work and then bring it into Paintshop Pro and NEGATE the image. For this picture, I didn't resize it and I left the icons at the bottom to show you I'm negating the whole entire 1024x768 screen, but you SEE that it definitely looks like it was sketched by hand BECAUSE the ink is BLACK, not white, and =YES= that is critical to make it look absolutely correct.

And for this particular picture, I added a few human elements fudging the sourcecode, the brush jitters it's angle a bit as it sketches and for each pixel it scans, there's a 1% chance of it getting too dark all of a sudden and then trying to correct itself by not painting enough later, to add a more human element to it.

Naturally for the other art I've done, I use different coding techniques. I wanted this one to be simple.

The reason I must invert the screen is the cursed little language, BlitzMAX, while it definitely has the ability to do ALPHA (brightness) effect and if you 'strengthen' the brush you get white, you can't do the reverse, you can't add black to black and somehow get shades of black, even if you start with a white page. That woulda saved me some thinking time but the negative effect does work after all.

So I thought about this for a moment and realized I had to write my program BACKWARDS. Where it creates a negative image starting with black paper and then airbrushing in using the standard brush technique which creates LIGHT but the RESULTS have to be a perfect negative of the image I worked with since in this case light is black and black is light and I plan to reverse it later giving the effect of a brush that darkens.

Then in Paintshop Pro I NEGATE the entire image itself before saving, and tah-dah ! You have the effect of the paintbrushes NOT looking like LIGHT elements but as DARK elements, in this case, INK, or map pencils, and therefore looks like human elements were involved.

That's how you do it ! And of course then you can make all kindsa interesting brushes and ways of doodling them in.

I hope this will stop the repetitive questions in my Email although I DO appreciate your enthusiasm on my method. Now go and write your own already !

Tools: Paintshop Pro 7, BlitzMAX

(Gallery)

As with all my work, both artistic and literary, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to enter them below and I will be more than happy to respond.