I get stuck on details before having a complete composition causing me to quit after having done just one or two details. It would be interesting to have feedback on canvas to do the ground work first and then moving though all the steps to get to a good, satisfying end result. The most basic version of this would be to fade out old paint to remind me of the time, a sort of time pressure to keep moving.
There are many ways to paint, what if we had a tool to share specific workflows. Having a guide that shows all the steps in a selected style would open up for learning experiences, borrowing from others and finding your own style.
That would be nice. However, I’m not sure that MyPaint is suited for such an assistant.
It’s easier for Word because text is something that is easily analysed by computers, and things like letters are quite formulaic. At lest the professional ones. For example:
“Dear Mrs. Gibson, I’m writing to you regarding the position eyebrow trimmer that you advertised last week.”
Word looks at what you have written and thinks “Oho! This sentence contains words from the letter writing keyword list!”. Cue the Word assistant to help you write a letter.
Drawing or painting an image is much more free-form, more akin to writing a novel. I would be very surprised if the Word assistant can help you write a novel.
How would this work in MyPaint? Let’s say you draw a circle and a triangle and two smaller circles within the first circle. A human might look at that and say “It looks like you are drawing a cat. Would you like help with that?”, but a computer would need a quite advance artificial intelligence to pull off the same trick.
Even if it’s more generic such as determining when it’s time to move from broad strokes to more details, how would MyPaint do that?
I think your best bet is to set the timer on your phone to five minutes with a message similar to “Ah ah ah! No details before you are finished with the structure of your drawing!”.
Yes, detecting exactly what a user is going to do in the future is not possible, that was apparently why the Words thing was removed. What I had in mind is closer to the newer digital assistants where you ask for a specific thing and then get some answer. Asking for driving direction is pretty close I think, you select where you want to go and get a few suggestions, but then follow those direction only as far the road allow.
A separate program could be of some help here and might actually be a good way to learn different approaches, I wonder if there are any good amount of major workflows recorded out there…
Then this just split into two ideas:
A phone app that is collection of compact drawing/painting “tutorials”
A way to connect that to layers position and opacity (maybe just via some keyboard shortcut)
Well if that is what you looking for that, you are better off just copying and pasting a tutorial or template on a Layer and just adjust the opacity of the layer. Honestly adding that kind of support to MyPaint will just add bloat to it. Plus as far as feedback is concern, you can utilize community such as this one or Deviantart if you need help with a particular part of your artwork.
With that said, I’m moving this the User Support category since this is really beyond the intended scope of what MyPaint can do.
Sorry I was unclear. The whole phone-app-tutorial thing would not be a part of mypaint. What I was searching for was a way to map every brush stroke to an action (like reducing layer opacity). I did not mean feedback as in “what do you all think?” but as in a visual way actually see where most strokes where put on canvas.
