In a post on DeviantArt, 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.Īlthough Hangmoon admits the software “may be missing some tools and filters for image processing … all about brush drawing … and has several unique features you won’t find anywhere else.” 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. You can control the way pattern and texture elements are distributed along a stroke in the same way. 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 Flame Painter thrown in.įrom 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.įrom the latter, it takes the ability to paint texture and pattern elements along a stroke.īut it’s in the customisability of the brushes that Paintstorm Studio really catches the eye.Īll 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.

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.

Paintstorm review