Visualists Rejoice! While we may hold great deal of visual tools available to us through software and hardware, sometime you come across something that captures your imagination and gives you a new techniques based on the presented flexibility of freeform that those maybe are. Alchemy is exactly that!
The Alchemy Interface
Alchemy is an open drawing project aimed at exploring how we can sketch, draw, and create on computers in new ways. Alchemy isn’t software for creating finished artwork, but rather a sketching environment that focuses on the absolute initial stage of the creation process. Experimental in nature, Alchemy lets you brainstorm visually to explore an expanded range of ideas and possibilities in a serendipitous way.
Modules
Alchemy consists of a growing number of ‘modules’ that can be added or removed at will. Using a given module you can do things like:
- Shout at the computer. Use your voice to control the width of a line or the form of a shape.
- Draw ‘blind’. Turn off the canvas display and explore what shapes emerge from the ‘darkness’.
- Create random shapes. Generate shapes that can be used as a starting point for characters, spaceships, or whatever shape you see in the ‘clouds’.
- Mirror draw. Draw mirrored symmetrical forms in realtime.
- Capture real colour. Use your web camera as a live colour palette.
- Randomise. Mess up and distort shapes.
Global Features
Other global features place focus on the ‘process’ of drawing, letting you do things like:
- Record a drawing ’session’. Automatically save the contents of the canvas to a page in a PDF file at set intervals.
- Auto-clear the canvas. Start drawing on a clean slate at set intervals. Force yourself to start over fresh.
- Switch the canvas. Automatically open your sketch in a more ‘conventional’ drawing application, either as a bitmap or vector file.
- Avoid distraction. Alchemy has a very minimal interface, just a simple toolbar that dissapears magically, and a fullscreen mode to block everything else out.
Download
http://al.chemy.org/download/
Please watch the Videos:
For a quick look at Alchemy in the ‘flesh’, check out the video of Andrew Jones demoing Alchemy in Shanghai. Along with developing the software itself, the project aims to become involved hands on in workshops, talks, and exercises focused on experimental drawing.