New Tool Idea: "Drag Draw"
I've developed a novel way of drawing vector shapes using a delayed "drag point" method which at first seems counter-intuitive, but is actually closer to the way people draw with pens and brushes, because the drawing point is distanced from the moving point by a controlled amount (as if drawing with a chain), smoothing out the resulting line. My working demo was built in Javascript and can be observed in the attached video, but would be much more powerful within Illustrator and Photoshop. The tool I created allows me to export SVGs and gives me the ability to create smooth organic shapes quickly. The tool also has a few "organic closure" options that finish off the closure of a shape smoothly or with a point, but various other programs are already capable of that.
I'm discussing the licensing of this with Astute Graphics currently (I think it fits well into their suite of vector tools), but no agreement has been worked out yet. I didn't bother to patent this (if it's even patent-able) so I'm probably making a mistake by posting here where anyone can just steal the idea, but there it is. I'd be interested in knowing what artists think of this approach/style and whether it would be desirable within Illustrator as a new drawing tool. Your thoughts?
The demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4jELmeMQEE
Brian Hauge
12/27/2017
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Brian, this is so cool.
The idea isn't that fresh, but the fact you have built such a demo is very imressing.Well, AstuteGraphis already have pulled-string option in latest DynamicSketch. Closure settings you offer is not implemented, but I quite like your approach!
Also, there's LazyNedzumi, which is more general separate powerful tool, that does the thing, you should see and try that.
And I would certainly work on native way to have it within AI, but only after they fix a huge list of bugs, trailing after AI for years.
Good luck!
