Bleank has released Black Ink 0.3, the new version of its customisable, GPU-accelerated painting software, adding what it describes as the “first shading editor ever created for a digital drawing app”. Black Ink also feature a fresh user experience with its clean and responsive user interface, instant access to brushes and colors history and real time visual brush preview. Black Ink development. We are an independant company dedicated to the development of Black Ink.
Russia’s Paintstorm Studio Developers Team – as far as we can tell, essentially a one-person outfit – has released Paintstorm Studio: an intriguing $19 paint package with a range of really novel brush features. A dream hybrid of paint packages? In the demo video above, the software comes across as an unusual hybrid of Corel Painter and Manga Studio – with perhaps a dash of tools like thrown in. From the former, it takes the standard conventions of a natural media paint package: a fully customisable UI with a brush library, bristle brushes, layers, colour picker and a rather nice-looking paint mixer.
From the latter, it takes the ability to paint texture and pattern elements along a stroke. But it’s in the customisability of the brushes that Paintstorm Studio really catches the eye. All brush parameters are fully customisable by means of ‘graphs’ (not node graphs: they’re more like falloff curves), leading to some highly unusual stroke forms and effects, as shown in the video above. You can in the same way. On top of that, there are some intriguing features like ‘dirty mode’ (above), which enables a brush to pick up colours from the last area of the canvas it came in contact with, just like physical oil paint. There’s also a ‘mask brush’, which applies a mask effect on top of a brush stroke, both of them varying dynamically as you paint, which looks like it generates some very complex forms.
Less off the wall, but potentially very useful, the close gaps feature automatically ignores small gaps in line art when filling it with a solid colour. Similarly, there’s a nice-looking one-point perspective painting system which scales brush strokes and pattern elements automatically according to their proximity to the vanishing point of an image. The software makes use of the GPU, so image and stroke scaling should be smooth; and as you might expect, it supports Wacom tablets, and imports PSD files.
A two-year labour of love In a, team member Hangmoon describes Paintstorm Studio as an attempt to collect favourite features from a range of software that snowballed into a labour of love spanning two years of spare-time work. Although Hangmoon admits the software “may be missing some tools and filters for image processing it’s all about brush drawing and has several unique features you won’t find anywhere else.” The UI won’t be to everyone’s taste, and is worth reading for potential issues you may experience when trialling Paintstorm Studio – but at under $20, it’s hard not to want to take it for a spin. Pricing and availability Paintstorm Studio is available for Windows Vista and above, price $19. A Mac OS X version is in development. You can also for 15 days – although again, check out the Polycount thread first.
BlackInk aims to provide a digital alternative to drawing. Instead of using a real life canvas and real life brushes, you can use a software application that features a user friendly interface and provides access to digital brushes. Get BlackInk and use it to draw anything you want. You will spend little time and effort on getting BlackInk up and running on your Windows PC. Downloading the installer will not take long.
After you run the aforementioned installer, a setup wizard will show up and take you step by step through the installation process. You will quickly and effortlessly be done with the whole thing. I liked three things about BlackInk’s interface. I liked that it is dark-themed and quite good looking. I liked that I did not have to go through a steep learning curve to figure out the interface. And I liked that hotkeys can be used to make interface elements go away. Press H for example and the interface will hide out of sight; you can thus work on your drawing in peace.
From a functionality point of view, you can expect to get the following from BlackInk: user friendly drawing environment; nice selection of brushes; preview a brush before using it; brush customization option; useful undo/redo function; save drawings as a PNG, JPG, JPEG, or BlackInk document. BlackInk is available as a trial and as a full version. The trial version is, of course, limited: can’t save custom brushes, limited picture size, free to use for a limited period of time.
BlackInk provides digital brushes and a user friendly environment you can use to create spectacular drawings. Pros You will spend little time and effort on getting BlackInk up and running on your Windows PC. The interface is good looking and easy to use.
Hotkeys are supported. There’s a nice selection of brushes; there’s a brush customization option.
Cons Multiple limitations for the trial version. Still a Beta at the time of writing this. You can download BlackInk free.