Drawing with Mischief as a sketching program
Putting pen or pencil to paper, usually the first way we developed or taught drawing skills for the last few hundred years, we became accustomed to applying pressure, moving at different speeds across the drawing surface, using a variety of widths to spread ink or graphite, and working against the feel of paper as the tooth of the surface pulled in color.
Adjusting to working digitally has usually gone one of two routes: work with tools that try to emulate the familiar analog ones, or play in the completely digital land of vector-based graphics, where bezier curves, fills, and manipulating handles and stroke weights gives artists the ability to draw at any scale, yet ignore the true application of pressure, speed and density of pigment.
Sarah Frisken, the Founder of Made by Mischief, lists her skills as “Teacher, researcher, scientist, engineer”, yet following a path from researching and developing medical imaging to responding to a request from Disney artists to make digital drawing tools that really could act like “real” ones, has artfully co-invented a revolutionary patented shape representation, known as Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields (ADFs). ADFs are at the core of the engine that became a drawing program called Mischief, which VFX software leader The Foundry acquired in June, though the official announcement was made today to coincide with a major upgrade to the program, along with launching a new website and a new team behind the product.
ADFs have several advantages for creative applications: they provide high-quality stroke rendering; they are amenable to hardware-based rendering so drawing is extremely responsive; they are very compact, resulting in small file sizes; they can be scaled without introducing pixelation artifacts; and they can accurately represent much richer and more complex shapes than traditional vector-based stroke representations. For Frisken, the acquisition of Made With Mischief by The Foundry enables her to retain her core vision of providing high-quality software tools for a wide range of artists and to preserve an accessible price point, while bringing future versions of the platform to an even broader audience.
What differentiates Mischief from other sketching or non bezier-curve based drawing packages, which would be the closest in category for comparison, are a few key factors: first, the ADFs basis makes it possible to draw incredible detail that never (yes, NEVER) loses its crispness as you increase the size of the drawing surface. This is almost hard to fathom, compared with the usual way of starting out at some pre-determined resolution and hoping you don’t need to change it too much in order to save yourself from blurred or pixelated images later.
Next, Mischief breaks the confines of screen limitations or, once again, pre-determining the size of your canvas or drawing area. It’s endless. Scroll up, down, left right, and burrow deeply into an area to create fine details. This doesn’t mean that Mischief can export SVG, EPS or other familiar vector-based files. Essentially it will currently only export a bit-mapped image out of the ADFs-created working document. Still, exporting is not to be dismissed considering the quality of detail it will produce from a relatively small file, much smaller than high-resolution images created in Photoshop, for instance.
Finally, the artists who are using Mischief for long and detailed projects report how real the on-screen response is when using pressure-sensitive tools, and, as a result, how much easier it is to create the art they want to draw without thinking about workarounds or waiting for the program to catch up to them.
LEFT to RIGHT: Chris Cheung,heading the product agenda for Made with Mischief, Founder Sarah Frisken, and Michael Mattesi, author of the popular and inspiring FORCE books at today’s live announcement from The Foundry
Images from the graphic novel version of Tim Minchin’s Storm
, illustrations by DC Turner using Mischief
In the live announcement today from The Foundry in London, Sarah was joined by Chris Cheung, who could be called “Head of Mischief” in his role listed as heading the product agenda, and artists who have been using the program and were delighted to show their work, such as DC Turner, animator and illustrator, who created the illustrations for the graphic novel version of Tim Minchin’s Storm completely in Mischief.
Also on hand to demonstrate Mischief (working on a pressure and touch responsive Wacom Cintiq monitor) was artist, author and teacher Mike Mattesi
who is best known for his series of art instruction books teaching dynamic force drawing (see below).
Michael Mattesi, author of the popular and inspiring FORCE books, demonstrating the natural strokes available with Mischief
Notable among the questions asked in the live announcement was about future integration of Mischief with other Foundry products. Though The Foundry is probably best know for NUKE, MODO, and MARI, FLIX (a web-based visual story development tool for feature animation—essentially a powerful storyboarding tool) was hinted as the first Foundry product that may tie-in with Mischief.
PRICING AND AVAILABILITY:
The updated version of Mischief for PC and Mac OS versions are available immediately, and it has been fine-tuned for Wacom stylus-based, pressure sensitive products as well as Windows 8 laptop/desktop and hybrid devices (such as the Surface Pro 2 and 3). There is a free version with limited brushes and non-layered workspace and a fully-functional, 15-day trial version (running on either PC or Mac OS). The full program sells as a download (not subscription based) for $25, and all versions are available immediately from https://www.madewithmischief.com/
Download it, draw with it, and share your art!
