Extending Manual Drawing Practices with Artist-Centric Programming Tools

Abstract

Procedural art, or art made with programming, suggests opportunities to extend traditional arts like painting and drawing; however, this potential is limited by tools that conflict with manual practices. Programming languages present learning barriers and manual drawing input is not a first class primitive in common programming models. We hypothesize that by developing programming languages and environments that align with how manual artists work, we can build procedural systems that enhance, rather than displace, manual art. To explore this, we developed Dynamic Brushes, a programming and drawing environment motivated by interviews with artists. Dynamic Brushes enables the creation of ad-hoc drawing tools that transform stylus inputs to procedural patterns. Applications range from transforming individual strokes to behaviors that draw multiple strokes simultaneously, respond to temporal events, and leverage external data. Results from an extended evaluation with artists provide guidelines for learnable, expressive systems that blend manual and procedural creation.