An Early Influence Reverberates Today

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In the 60’s I was fascinated with NASA’s space program. I enthusiastically scrutinized any articles or images associated with space. By the early 70’s NASA directed some of their imaging system towards earth itself. One such program was the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, later renamed LANDSAT. 

When I first saw a LANDSAT image, I thought I was looking at an abstract painting. It was only when I read the caption that I realized this was the surface of the earth as viewed from 438 miles up.

Brandberg Massif, Namibia • LANDSAT image

The raw beauty of the color and texture impacted me on a very deep level. In many cases, this macroscopic view of earth was surprisingly similar to the close-up view we observe from a few feet off the ground…the earth is a fractal. 

In 1976 as part of the Bicentennial, NASA published Mission to Earth: LANDSAT Views the World. I immediately ordered a copy from the government printing office. It was $14 well spent. 

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The multiple levels of self-similarity influenced me greatly in my evolving paintings. I began to utilize a visual vocabulary borrowed from the LANDSAT imagery.

View from on High • Acrylic, 1977

When my career in digital paint software development began in 1985, I had the ability to digitally convert my photographs to the computer for further interpretation and enhancement. I did a series of images that combined photos of graphic elements found on the ground, which I called MANSAT—LANDSAT style images of the ground from human height. 

MANSAT #3 • Digital Painting, 1986

To this day, I still photograph details of textures found in nature…I have thousands of them! It is this unrelenting fascination with the fractal quality of our natural surroundings that I now realize is yet another puzzle piece that has led me to my latest project, the Emergence brush system for Corel Painter.

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If you’d like to see a great set of examples of LANDSAT imagery, check out the NASA publication, Earth as Art. It is available as a free PDF file here.

Emergence is Coming!

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The Emergence brush system for Painter is coming soon…it will be released in February.

The above image highlights the emergent textures that Emergence creates. The 3 strokes were created using individual paper grains to generate the resulting textural content. The texture never repeats, although it will always have a similar expressive character based on the seed grain.

I will be posting additional details in the coming weeks.

Stay Tuned!

A 25 Year Quest is Rewarded

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Sometimes an idea doesn’t come in a flash. In this case it took years. It can happen to you, too. You just have to be patient.

25 years ago in 1994, I was one of the primary authors of Painter (now owned by Corel) along with Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges. We were finishing up development of Painter 3. Mark and I were responsible for new features and this edition was packed with them: Animation, a basic layering system that predated Photoshop, the Image Hose, canvas rotation, the now ubiquitous triangle-in-a-circle color palette, bristle brushes, a seamless pattern maker, and others I can’t remember.

Mark had written a new brush type, the Drip method, that has a unique quality. Brushes that use the Drip method can both apply and smear underlying paint within the same stroke. This ability enabled crafting some interesting brushes. One of my regular tasks was to create new content for the shipping Brush Library. Included brushes that utilized the Drip method included Big Wet Kiss, Flemish Rub, and the Sargent brushes, among others. Big Wet and Flemish have long since faded away, but the Sargent brush became a popular user favorite. 

The Sargent marches on

While creating these brushes, I took note of an odd artifact that appeared whenever the Drip method utilized a Paper Grain. These textural grains emulate the surface of a physical medium like canvas or paper. It is one of the features that allow Painter to realistically mimic traditional natural media. 

Whenever grain was enabled, the Sargent brush produced striations in the applied strokes due to the interaction of the stroke with the paper grain. The result wasn’t entirely undesirable, but it didn’t respect paper grain the way other texture-bearing brushes did. I knew there was something to this behavior and tucked it away for future reference.

The Sargent is restricted to base

Another limitation to become problematic in future Painter releases was that brushes utilizing the Drip method did not work on layers. This was no problem at the time of release as full-blown layers did not yet exist when Painter 3 was developed. In future releases, however, this limitation severely hobbled usage of Drip method-based brushes. Users came up with workarounds, but the best way to take advantage of the Sargent brush was to restrict painting to the canvas.

The Sargent finally gets a Promotion

After 20+ years of being confined to base, Corel updated the Drip method to layer-aware status with the release of Painter 2018. This now enabled the Sargent brush to work on layers. I had always kept the Sargent’s odd grain interaction in the back of my mind and it was now time to revisit this unique behavior. 

The Sargent learns to Dance

Another new feature of Painter 2018 was random grain rotation and position. A single paper grain could now exhibit a greater range of textural possibilities. This could add yet another dimension to the Sargent brush’s unique grain interaction.

So how does all this Painter arcana fit together? 

Ever since I noticed the Sargent brush’s odd behavior back in 1994, I had a strong intuition that this could be a powerful technique for creating complex brushstrokes. What I didn’t know then was that other key parts of the puzzle had not yet been realized. Once Painter 2018 arrived, the additional pieces had arrived.

Created with Emergence

Having seen that initial glimpse 25 years earlier provided me with the insight to combine the new puzzle pieces into a complete realization resulting in my Emergence brush system. By utilizing specially developed paper grains (another puzzle piece), Emergence brushes never repeat a patterned textural element within a stroke, which is consistent with real-world analog brushstrokes. The culmination is a rich textural painting environment, a quest on I have been on for over 2 decades.


Sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks.



A Preview of My Upcoming Painter Brushes

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Click image to enlarge

One of the primary features of my upcoming Painter brushes is that they produce emergent brushstrokes. What does this mean? As strokes are painted, each produces a unique textural variation. The result is that no two strokes will ever be exactly alike.

Consider the textural complexity observed throughout the surface of a snowy mountainside. Many local features will appear related, yet no two features will be identical. It is the nature of self-similar features viewed at different scales that create the richness of detail observed in every part of the scene. Textural complexity such as this engages our visual senses and creates interest.

I created the above image with my new emergent brushes. The resulting painting rivals the complexity typically associated with a photograph. This is merely one application of the brushes. They are capable of a much wider range of expression. I will be posting more examples of these brushes in action as I prepare them for release.

Note: I used a mountainscape I found on the web as my reference. This is not cloned; it was created from scratch.

Color Wheel Keeps on Turnin'

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As a color selection tool, a hue ring with an enclosed saturation/value triangle (or square) is found in nearly all graphic software apps these days. Where did this design originate? I confess…it was I and it originated in Painter.

Mark Zimmer, the mind behind Painter, implemented Painter 1.0’s original color palette.

Painter 1.0

Painter 1.0

 Mark utilized a linear spectrum gradient and sliding widget to select the desired hue. This action updated a saturation/value triangle with the chosen hue. A second widget internal to the triangle was then positioned to select the desired color within the triangle. This design was used through Painter 2.0.

 By the time we started working on Painter 3.0, the interface was getting very crowded with new palettes, a reflection of the many new tools we had introduced since Painter 1.0. This provided the opportunity to re-think the color palette, which I was responsible for. 

 It had always nagged me that the linear hue selector misrepresented the continuous nature of color. The blue hues at either end of the gradient were actually direct neighbors. I realized that this discontinuity would be corrected if the linear gradient were portrayed as a circle, much like traditional color wheels. Design-wise, it made perfect sense to enclose the saturation/value triangle within the hue ring. And so, the triangle-in-a-circle color palette design debuted in Painter 3.0.

PAinter 3.0 (left), Painter 2019 (right)

PAinter 3.0 (left), Painter 2019 (right)

Painter’s color palette has had several minor updates over the years, but the basic design remains. In the interim, this design has flourished and been duplicated by many graphics apps. It’s been personally gratifying to see my design find wide usage throughout the software art community.

You can learn all about the history of the traditional color wheel here.