The February is here and I am forced to admit that my plan to get the first public version of C2 out in January failed. I have been working hard to achieve that goal and even a week before the end of the month it looked I may actually succeed. What was left was to prepare some brush variants and draw an image or two to test everything. A kind of work which shouldn’t took a lot of time… if everything went smoothly. Unfortunately, “going smoothly” is a rare occurrence in the software development process. What actually happened is that preparation of brushes resulted in some “discrepancy between obtained and expected results” which lead to various modifications and bug fixes in the brush engine. I considered that work too important to postpone it.

The brush system is the heart of a painting application. When I try a new painting application, the first thing I do is to dabble with its brushes. If I don’t like them or find them unsuitable for my kind of illustration work then I probably won’t examine that application further. Comicado has a quite simple brush engine, most suited for general drawing and inking, but its overall painting potential is nothing to boast about. C2 certainly needed improvements in that area –  a brush engine with more features that is applicable to wider range of drawing and painting techniques.

The following images show some drawing brushes of C2 in action. Watch them in full size to fully observe differences in produced lines.

Here is one bearded fella with a feathered buddy.

The left version was drawn with the standard pen. The middle version was drawn with the same standard pen utilizing the “dry brush” brush feature. The right version was drawn with the vector pen and is interesting for comparison. It is obvious that for this kind of inked art (with black areas and greater variety in inked lines) the brush tools are the better option. Of course, vector lines have their advantages and for some less busy drawings which get colored afterward they may be a preferred solution.

One last thing for this post. So far I have been calling my new application C2. This is going to change in future as I need to give it the released build a proper name. A name which will quite likely be –  JugiPaint Studio ( or shorter –  JugiPaint ). Unless, of course, I get struck with an awesome idea for a more awesome name (Awesome Paint Studio ? :)).