Paint splatter simulator for use with Photoshop

Jan-2-08, 2:41 pm by Hanford
File under: Photoshop, design, Director, Adobe, Shockwave, Lingo

When you're a hobbiest programmer, every problem looks like it can be solved with a little scripting. This Holiday season I was working on a for-print art project and I needed some paint splatter for texture. Splattering paint is a great way to get some organic texture into a piece of art, but it's messy and requires a lot of room. So I decided to try writing a quick script to see if I could accurately simulate it.

The end result is this little web app I wrote. It's got a little bit of GUI to make it easy to adjust the amount of splatter you need. The end result is an image that you can use in Photoshop.

Here's a brief rundown of how it works:

+ The canvas is made up of "passes" of paint splatter. You can Add and delete as many passes as you want.
+ Each pass has it's own set of settings. you click on a pass on the left, then you can change the settings for that pass.
+ double-headed sliders set minimums and maximums for settings.
+ As you change settings, you'll see a realtime preview of just that pass on the right.
+ when you stop dragging a slider, the big canvas will re-splatter with your new settings.
+ To get the image into Photoshop, you click on the "Copy to clipboard" button or "copy inverted", which reverses it for better channel creation.
+ You can tweak with a small sized canvas, then when you got it the way you want, make the canvas bigger.
+ There's no way to save settings yet.

you may need to install the latest Shockwave plug-in to make it work. Enjoy

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Marty Plumbo wrote: Jan-7-08, 5:45 am

I don't usually like the condensed typefaces, but that one is mighty nice in a GUI. Sort of modern, sort of authoritative yet still kind of fun.

Thanks, HL!

Hanford wrote: Jan-7-08, 1:57 am

The typeface is Univers condensed. I'm partial to it, and I use it in a lot of stuff.

Marty Plumbo wrote: Jan-5-08, 6:55 am

Heya, Hanford! Great to see you posting again!

I'm curious, what typeface did you use on your splatter widget?

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