by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

It's been quite a while since we last took a look at Studio Artist, the painting and rotoscoping tool from Synthetik Software. This week we're going to explore some of Studio Artist's functions to help you create the effect of a charcoal or bronze rubbing, an effect similar to that of placing a quarter under a piece of paper and scratching a pencil over it. This is also used with grave stones, typically with the person placing a large sheet of paper over the relief and rubbing a stick of soft metal across it. For this tutorial, we'll be using a stained-glass window and creating the effect of taking a rubbing with a piece of bronze. (You see the final effect on the right. The original image is below it.)

Incidentally, if your only interest is achieving this effect (as opposed to learning how to do it), you can download several of the presets I created for this tutorial right here. (They're mostly minor variations on the method we'll use here. The one used in this tutorial is "Rubbing 7.")

If you're more interested in learning how these things work in Studio Artist so you can create your own unique effects, read on. This piece will cover a huge number of Paint Synthesizer functions that will be useful not just for creating this rubbing effect, but for creating others as well.

If you don't yet have Studio Artist, make sure you download the demo. You'll find it here. (Studio Artist, at present, runs only on the Mac.)

We begin by opening up Studio Artist and choosing for our source image something that preferably contains some geometric design elements and a decent amount of contrast. Make sure your Canvas is set to white, and switch your color palette from Source Image to Color Squares. (You can use any color for this tutorial, but greenish browns will be best for the bronze coloring; black works best for charcoal.)

Now we go into the Paint Synthesizer. I'm assuming that you're starting with the default Paint Patch in the "General" category. The first thing we're going to want to set is the way the paint is applied to the Canvas. We certainly don't want to make this look like it's been painted on. It needs to look "scratchy" and pretty flat. So the paint needs to fill from "Paint Brush Load," and we'll modulate it with "Paint Hue." (This will create some slight variations in color even when we're painting with a single swatch.) We're going to fill to the Canvas Image, and then our fill option will be Multiblend with a Texture multiplier. (These last two are required to generate any kind of image whatsoever.) Composite options are up to you. I've chosen Dif Darken because I like the softer look it creates. Play around with the composite modes to achieve varying results.

At this point you should be able to achieve some fairly interesting results, but not exactly what we're going for here. This is mainly owing to the fact that the strokes aren't working the way you might work if you were actually taking a rubbing. So now let's go in and change the way the strokes are applied. First, for the origin, I'm going to go into the Path Start palette and make only one change. I'm going to set the Generator to "Golden Spiral." This will cause the strokes to be drawn from the center of the image outward in a spiral patter. (You could change this to something like "Border Clockwise" for another nice effect.) If you test out the setting's you're creating right now, you'll see how this works. (It will become less obvious later on.)