Art sneak peak

Frances and I have been hard at work on our educational game and we finally have our first finished pieces of art to show off. Our process involves several conversions from pencil and paper to digital to paint and back to digital, but I think the results speak for themselves. Only 30 animals left to complete. Let us know what you think!

      

Messing around with Alchemy

Today I discovered a drawing program called Alchemy that blew my mind. Like many awesome things on the internet, I stumbled upon it while browsing some art forums. After following some links I was led to the official website of Alchemy where I saw the true creative potential of the program and immediately downloaded it to give it a try.

Alchemy is a free, open source program that allows for abstract, improvisational drawing. It doesn't offer anywhere near the level of control of traditional art software such as Photoshop or Illustrator, but that's not exactly what it is trying to accomplish either. There are no brushes or layers or anything else you might be use to... instead you utilize stylistic effects that react to a number of different input styles. It is best used with a pen tablet where your speed and stroke direction translates to abstract shapes of different sizes and angles. It can even take microphone input to determine line thickness based on volume! Once you have your basic building blocks created you can export them as vectors and refine your designs in another program. The best thing I can compare it to would be figure drawing; fast, imperfect drawing to establish form and emotion. It also reminds me a lot of Chinese ink painting that I used to do in high school.

I spent an hour or so watching some videos of how others have used Alchemy and messed around with settings to see what I could create. After I thought I had the controls down I decided to try my hand at making a finished art piece. Though it may not be all that impressive on its own, the robot to the right was created entirely in Alchemy in under 30 minutes. I really surprised myself with what I was able to accomplish on my first try.

I'm having a lot of fun with this so I thought I would share it with whoever reads my blog (mostly other graphic and game design peeps) in hopes that I might be able to see what some of you guys can create. You can check out their website to download the software. There are quite a few videos on YouTube as well that can get your creative juices flowing. I intend on using Alchemy for at least one set of posters for the 4x12 Poster Challenge.

Recently I have also found a new 2D game engine called Construct (also free and open source) which I am trying to learn so I can finish some side projects that I have had sitting around in my head for a long time. Now that I've found Alchemy I've got a whole new batch of ideas on how I can integrate these extremely unique visuals into a simple 2D game. I will probably explain a little bit more about Construct once I have something to show.

Hope you get a chance to check out Alchemy, and if you do let me know what you think!