by
David Nagel
Executive
Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
This week
we're back to Synthetik Studio Artist to take a look at another
one of those features that makes this program unique, namely the
ability to use media that interact with one another like liquids.
Those of you with natural media backgrounds, particularly life
drawing, are familiar enough with washes and the great ways they
can interact with dry media like charcoal or Conté. I can
remember in my art school using everything from watered-down Dr.
Martin inks applied with a rag to transmission fluid applied with
a very expensive sable brush. (In retrospect, maybe I should have
done things the other way around.)
Washes and crayons in Studio Artist.
Image by David Nagel. |
Studio Artist
has the ability to synthesize similar tools, except that, unlike
those experimental art supplies you might have found in the automotive
store, these ones aren't saturated with carcinogens, unless you
count the phosphor from your screen, which I don't. If simply
emulating natural media isn't your thing, take heart in the fact
that your work in Studio Artist can be animated, which only happens
in natural media when you work in a poorly ventilated studio.
You can achieve
a variety of effects with washes in Studio Artist. These range
from washes that will only apply themselves to white areas of
the canvas (for a look that appears like watercolor on Wax) all
the way down to chunky black stuff that will make your underlying
strokes bleed. The program itself includes a few, and I've created
20 variations of my own washes that can be downloaded here
for those of you who don't like to read tutorials or for those
who want to use these as a staring point for your own washes.
For this particular
tutorial, I'll show you how to create a light black wash that
causes bleeding and distortion of the underlying stroke. The image
above and to the right is an example I created using nothing but
Studio Artist's built-in Crayon tool and some washes I put together
in the Paint Synthesizer. And below you'll see an example of four
strokes, three of which show the kinds of washes I used in that
image.
The stroke
on the left is a straight line that looks something like a Conté
crayon (using the Crackle 1 preset under the Crayon category that
comes standard with Studio Artist). The second stroke uses a wash
that doesn't interact at all with the Conté stroke but
that just applies a tint to the surrounding canvas. Next, you
see the stroke with a wash applied (with hard pressure) to create
bleeding. And on the right you see the wash applied with medium
pressure to produce more of a blur than a bleed and also distortion
of the Conté stroke. You can create all of these fairly
easily using Studio Artist's Paint Synthesizer, and you can save
the resulting Paint Patches for future use so that you don't have
to recreate the wash every time you want to use it.
First, just
pick a preset you want to modify to turn it into a wash. I'll
start, as usual, with the first brush in the General category,
Bristle Paint-Contoured. Now we'll do some tweaking to make it
behave like a wash.
So switch
into Paint Synthesizer mode and select the category Paint Fill.
Use the following settings:
Fill From:
Canvas Image
Modulate: Mult
Mod %: 2
Fill To: Canvas Image
Fill Option: Blend
Now try applying
this setting over a regular Conté crayon stroke. You can
already stop right there. You have a bristly wash. But you can
also take it a little further without much trouble. In the same
Paint Fill palette, change the Algorithm to Mix Apply/Displace
Out. Right under that, switch Replace to Dif Darken. And change
the Blend % to 12. Now try applying it again.
Left to
right: A plain Conté stroke; Bristle Paint-Contoured;
the first set of changes; the second set of changes.
What you'll
notice is that the first set of changes produced a gray wash that
also can darken any underlying strokes but doesn't do anything
really interesting. The second set of changes added some clumpiness
and added the ability to create much more significant bleed on
the underlying stroke. (To mellow this out a bit, you can bring
down the blend percentage.)
One of the
things you might notice whenever you use Mix Apply/Displace Out
is that you get some spacing along your stroke. If you want to
cut down this spacing (or increase it), go into the Path Application
panel of the Paint Synthesizer and adjust the parameter called
"Spacing %." If you take it down to 0, you should get
smoother paths.
In this pane,
you'll also see a parameter called "Displace," which,
by default, is set to None. Now, maybe you don't want your wash
to distort your stroke, but this parameter can also be used for
some other interesting effects.
The four examples
above all use the same Paint Fill parameters we discussed earlier.
The only difference is their Displace mode. The one on the left
uses Chaotic; the second uses Uniform Random 2D; the third uses
Rossler; and the fourth uses Luminance. All subsettings are default.
(You will find all four of these in the downloadable
set of washes I've created.) Play around with other forms
of displacement as well. Some will distort your strokes into wavy
curves. Others will, like the ones above, add depth and texture
to a simple stroke.
We can also
change the type of brush being used to produce even more varied
effects. You make these changes under the Paint Synthesizer palette
called "Brush Type," which, by default, is set to Procedural
Brush. Change these settings to produce variations seen below.
The image
on the left is a Procedural Brush; the second is a Source Brush;
the third is a Stretch1 Source Brush; and the fourth is a Computational
Stretch.
Finally, you're
probably going to want to modify the height and width of the wash
you're using, since, typically, washes are applied with less delicate
tools. To change the size of the brush, go into the Paint Synthesizer
palette called "Brush Source." To alter the size of
the brush, change the Horizontal and Vertical parameters. (For
values higher than 100, you just have to enter the number manually
rather than using the slider.) In this same palette, you can also
change the shape of the brush by tweaking the Corner Pull, Pre
Sym and Post Sym values.
If you have
no use for Computational Brushes, you can also import an image
to use as a brush, in which case the size will be determined by
the image you bring in. To do this, change the Brush Source to
Image. Then select the File menu and choose "New Image Brush...."
Select your image, and you're good to go.
In our examples,
you can also use pressure from an input tablet to determine the
size of the brush you're using, in which case the values you've
entered represent the maximum size of the brush. (The same applies
to image brushes; just remember that large images can slow things
down.) Download my 20 wash presets here.
For more Studio Artist presets, visit http://www.creativemac.com/downloads/studioartist/index.htm.
For more information about Studio Artist or to download a demo,
visit http://www.synthetik.com.
