Isolationism

Every once in a while you run into a piece of really nice software that you have to sing form the hilltops about. Everyone who’s even casually glanced at my blog knows by now that I feel that way about Boodler, although I know my audience’s interest in the same is considerably less than my own.

I’m writing today to talk to about another piece of software that is right up my alley that you probably don’t care about: It’s called ArtRage and is made by the folks at Ambient Design who appear to write software geared toward designers and artists.

Well, for starters, the bad news: ArtRage 2 isn’t free, nor is it open-source. It’s available for Windows and Macintosh but not Linux (although some users have got it running under Wine, the reports from different users seem mixed from my skimming).

Now, the good. To start, ArtRage does have a free product called the “ArtRage 2 Free Edition” which lets you try out a limited set of tools and features. The better news, though, is that the full edition is dirt cheap at $20 USD for the full product (downloaded)—I can’t remember the last time I saw software that cost so little without actually being free. The most criminial part of it, though, is that ArtRage is $200+ software, but it seems their business model is to try to sell to the casual user and try to make more sales based on a very affordable price instead of losing so many users to piracy like another, more popular vendor of graphic software. I will grant you that their software is more polished and has more features, but come on Adobe: You’re smoking crack to think those prices are reasonable considering how brutally you dominate the market; you make Microsoft look like moderates in comparison.

It seems strange, but Adobe hasn’t really put serious effort into winning over so-called ‘fine art’ artists with Photoshop. Of course Craig Mullins—who uses Photoshop exclusively for his work—would no doubt tell you differently, but the fact is Adobe’s tools are still oriented primarily toward photo editing work and not the creation of fine art, as it were. There is however a product called Painter (which is almost as old as Photoshop, but has been bought out several times and is now owned by Corel). I am a Painter IX.5 owner and user, although I seem to only load it once in a blue moon. There are a few reasons why this is, which I’ll explain by way of comparison.

First and foremost, ArtRage is really geared toward artists who want to create fine art using (chiefly) traditional media: Pencils, paints, chalk/pastel, and a few others, while Painter seems to want to be able to do everything for everybody, including artists, designers, animators, and photo editors. Of course this makes for an impressive feature set, but it also makes the product bigger and more complicated (and confusing) than it needs to be.

The most immediately striking feature of ArtRage is its simplicity. You select a tool from a short list of a dozen or so, adjust somewhere between 1-5 settings available for that tool, pick a colour, and start painting. By contrast, Painter not only has dozens of tool categories, but within each are dozens more “presets” for each tool, each which can vary drastically in appearance from its neighbours (although more frequently these are just different brush quality presets based on size, wetness, etc.). You can spend an eternity wading through the available brushes—and you can spend even more time trying to build your own sifting through hundreds of different variables that determine how the brush behaves.

You might intuitively think that more choice is better, especially when you have the ability to design your own brushes—I mean, how could something with only a few tweaks compare? The fact is, ArtRage beats Painter hands-down in this department for two reasons. First, I spend less time fiddling around with the brushes (and the hand-numbingly cramped interface for choosing one) and more time painting. The second and more poignant advantage ArtRage has over Painter is the media just works. Things not only look and behave just the way you would expect them to in real life, but they also do it in real time as well. I’ve spent hours trying (and failing) to get a palette knife in Painter to behave exactly like ArtRage does effortlessly out of the box. I didn’t even have to tweak my tablet settings; I just picked it up and started using it, and every tool worked just about exactly the way I thought it would (with the exception of the Intuos airbrush, but I guess not a lot of people use those, and only the Intuos line of tablets have them at all).

Another frustration I’ve hinted at with Painter is its complex interface: There are dozens of palettes to clutter your screen but most of the time all you really need is your paint and a choice of tools; again, ArtRage lays the smack down on Painter by having the bare minimum of palettes to get the job done; you can tuck them away by pressing Tab or hide them altogether by hitting Enter. ArtRage is also clever enough to temporarily hide palettes as you paint close to them so you can rough out the corners without hiding the palettes at all.

One strange (and not entirely welcome, at least initially) feature of ArtRage is that it uses its own widgets for the GUI instead of relying on those from Windows (or MacOS, if you’re a Mac user) which can be annoying—after all, you’d think it’s safe to assume users will have already set up their desktops to their liking and may not like their interface. But I realised after some thought that this was intentional on Ambient Design’s part: First, it means users of different operating systems all get the same interface experience, making tutorials and the like easier to write. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it ensures that you get a good colour-neutral interface with which to do your design work, so your colour perception isn’t skewed by the colour of interface widgets which might be subtly tinted from perfectly neutral grey. Third, I think the interface designers at Ambient Design realised they could compact more features into a smaller space by designing their own GUI elements as opposed to using Windows’ default tools, and they’re right — the colour picker is an integral part of the interface, as it should be, instead of requiring a clunky dialog or a floating window pane that is always underfoot (or is that overfoot?).

What may possibly be my favourite feature, however, is the way reference materials work. Every other piece of art software on the planet I’ve ever used follows the “window” paradigm if you want to display reference material (without actually tracing something, which is a different story). This means you have to tile your windows just right to make the source material fit visibly so it doesn’t get lost behind your drawing when you switch panes. By comparison, ArtRage’s approach is so stupefyingly elegant it’s an embarassment that other developers haven’t come up with it; you load a reference image and it pins the image to the canvas you’re working on: no more wasted space due to tiling. It gets better, though: The pinned image can be moved to any location on the screen and resized (proportionally) to suit your tastes. You can also rotate the pinned image to suit your drawing, and you can zoom in and out within the source image to look at an area of detail without having to resize the photograph itself. Brilliant!

All told, ArtRage has earned my respect as a great piece of software; it may never achieve the popularity of Photoshop (because of its limited market and how small the company is), but it deserves attention none the less. If you find yourself with some free time and wanting to noodle around a bit with computer-based art, I highly recommend giving their free product a whirl for fun. You may find yourself shelling out for the full package before long (it took me a whole hour to decide I had to have it). The image I painted of Becka was done last night as my first piece of art in the software ever; it took me about an hour to produce.

Happy painting!