Intars' gallery

Yes Verve has a sharper edge compared to the best painting apps, it is the most natural media, if it could just handle higher resolutions there would be no need for other packages to paint big compos, transform tools could be spared.
CDF means computational fluid dynamics

About Games, I like so much Vintage Story, its very cheap and its underrated, better and harder survival than MineCraft, creative Mode also very good, for building Voxel-Things.

https://www.vintagestory.at/

Maybe I will get even inspiration for paintings, because ladscpae can look very impressive there.

Today is the day when 'mysterious' verve-painting, that i slowly and patiently developed over the course of more then a year, is finished 100%. Today i finally made last preparations - made a signature, and now the previously mentioned drawing comes right into our forum as a first place. This is a verve-painting that i showed only in some work-in-progress fragments. Now you can see for yourselves what it was.

There is so much time that passed since the first brushes were made for this verve-painting:( . And how much events happened since my last post - almighty Randomness and variously related events made it so that i took part in change of my living place and now reside in totally different, new to me country. I live in Denmark now. Never been to any Scandinavic countries before, never lived there, never knew anything precise about their environments, had lived all my current life in one of the Baltic states.

Also, one month ago, on 17th September i had a big, personally great day - a celebration of finishing university and getting bachelors degree in computer science. In one of the previous posts, i mentioned that i was planning to defend my diploma work around Feb-March 2021 but the whole thing turned out into so much more prolonged adventure and hardened battle. It is another story for another time; it suffices now to say that diploma work took more time, took more effort, additional iterations, unimaginably lot of editorial time until i arrived at something that fitted both - formal requirements (i wrote 260 pages but commission decided to order it to be reduced in half to be accepted; hence lot of work) and my personal satisfaction to strict minimum degree so i could with a piece in my mind look back at everything accomplished there, in this personal life changing "document".

I moved into Denmark at the very end of April 2021, which itself is telling of one peculiar fact - i had to move right in parallel of work on diploma work with a diploma work defense deadline on September. But even in all this chaos and transition adventure i held firmly to 'mysterious' drawing and incremental sessions on finishing it in some free time moments. That is why it took so long

That drawing is made out of passion for some old, really, really old computer graphics historical branch so to speak. My laptop's IntelHD card, as you may guess, is at odds with verve, especially on larger resolutions. This drawing is 1880x1700 which makes it my largest verve-painting yet so you can approx. imagine performance issues. There was only half of a real-time performance but here is what differentiates this project from my other drawings - i decided that this time i even want it to be slow because idea was to use this drawing as a meditation place during hard moments during studies. So, with a performance hit, i consciously reverted the whole process to the steady, patient, meditative pixel-verve-brushing all the way until the very finish line

Taron, once again - you can be proud about your software. I had opportunity to observe how verve-painter behaves on near pixel level brushes and i am happy what i saw and experienced. You indeed can smear and smudge even pixels. But alright.. back to topic. This drawing started on November 2019, with huge pauses and breaks (due to studies) it is finished now, on 30 Oct 2021.

In that very same time period, in parallel, i created few other verve paintings and you will see them, too. One was even made as specific illustration-scheme for diploma work text (i am proud about that especially, you know ). You will see them all later on, this forum will be first place to see them; just be patient. Now, about the main drawing itself - I guess some of you will be puzzled why such a dedication, so much energy into what certainly wasn't the best piece of a gem under 8-bit 'world'. I had great memories attached to it and also i knew there is little fan art to it. So, in a sense, i took my chances to show how one can treat old, less popular game worlds as an artistic source material. I am confident that original Japanese game developers, with all the troubles, put some passion into the whole original thing, when they programmed/designed the whole thing. It is sad we don't know much about actual developers on personal stories level. Nevertheless, my drawing is a tribute to an 8-bit world artworks - this is 99.8% verve (with a signature and slight, careful final contrast adjustment in Gimp today). And with that remaining metaphorical 0.2% we made it to the 100th %

So, enjoy, verve folks, my "Turtles 1 on NES" fan art. I am so happy to release it. Currently you are the only ones to see it first because i will post it elsewhere not sooner than many days or some weeks.
I like verve-painter as a tool so much!

[Taron]

Haha, wow, that's wicked! ...what a wild idea, Intars!
No doubt, Ninja Turtle fans will appreciate it, too!
Definitely looks like a game, captured in oil.

Congratulations on finishing it!!!

nice to see art from you again here

well done

That rocks Intars I remember playing TMT on the first Nintendo many years ago. Fun times and fitting image

So, some of you liked the end result after all... Hi hii
Thanks for input, folks

Taron, you made me a compliment: intent was exactly and precisely to try capture feeling, atmosphere and NES turtles 1 as if in oil paint.
Everything with this image started two-fold: one --> to leave and get used to my notebooks intelHD cards limits; and two --> two explore smudges and brushes on pixel level.
And from there, from pixel level mind remembered one thing - NES 8 bit art worlds. Theme somehow suggested and manifested itself, and so, i started long work. As for other
NES Turtle fans they will have to wait still a little bit since i don't upload it on all other my art sharing channels. So for now only you, verve folks and some anonymous bypassers
here on this forum.

There will be more art from me, and its not like i was totally gone from here by decision. No, no, no - i was just busy. New paintings already exist and soon you will see them, too.

Tartan, fin times for sure. Back then, omg, what an experience it was - to have those yellow cartridges. Still remember the day when father out of a sudden, one day, brought home
to us (me and my brother) a new cartridge for also back then relatively recently purchased NES and on cartridge we saw sticker with Turtles At those times we saw them as TV
cartoon series, all the local kids were into TMNT. We didn't know back then such concepts as copyright, piracy and so on, and thus had no clue why enemies bots are those weird
creatures never seen in any of cartoons or comic series Still we played it as a fantastic (and very hard) game in first experience. Of course, later Turtles on NES brought more
correct line of characters, enemies, gameplay advances. But i still decided that this time art goes to the very first game with all its world.

Below i add additional snaps from this project. These are some wip images and close-ups of finished verve-painting. In order to depict characters close to their original looks (while
retaining verve painters capabilities to smudge and paint) i did use references from original game. It was decided intention to keep as close to original 8-bit art as possible.

Below can be seen one of the early period's, March 2020 snap of work in progress. As it can be seen, initially Turtle game name in Chinese
was drawn at the bottom but in later stages it was 'teleported' to upper part of image. I simply patiently repainted it in upper part because
i really wanted to stay in verve all the time, besides while doing text block repaint i kind of got to know its shape better and made it more
refined and pronounced.

The black "pixel-eating" hole was something that i had to struggle with constantly. I don't know if its me or my notebooks IntelGraphics glitches
or if lack of precise knowledge of verve painter's inner mechanics but this black hole thing was something like a sort of terror nest during whole
project If i tried to paint anything near or on it, it would grow larger, eating neighboring color pixels on that layer. At later stages i started
to suspect that this black-hole area actually could be triggered by me hitting some accidental hot-key for some sort of alpha-mask functionality
which, admittedly, i still haven't mastered in verve painter quite yet. Later on i found way how to bypass this black-hole thing.

So, that is the snap from around March 2020 - one of the early, initial stage when actually quite large part of the painting was already blocked out.

At the end Turtles were drawn in separate, copied verve-file and once finished - exported as .png and imported back into original verve-file.
As we know, in NES Turtles 1 we never actually see turtles together at once due to game mechanics. This image was partly inspired by the will
to imagine and see them all side by side in this game's world setup - something that original game was not designed to deliver back in 1989.

I just liked it so much how verve enabled pixels to be pushed around under mechanism of paint fluid imitation. It was really empowering for
me to know that verve painter will enable me to pull of the exact look that i was for. Once again, great tool, Taron!

And some close ups: ... of course, in close up, the overall effect as if it would be oil becomes really less pronounced.