The making of the New Paintology App

This is a detailed look at the thinking and the philosophy behind the upcoming new Paintology drawing app soon to be launched on Google play store.

The reworked Paintology app (available from the Google store) was developed over a period of 9 months. It carries the core features that separates the app from many of the other drawing apps. This is to reveal methods and approaches to digital drawing paving the way for fundamentals of art in the digital medium. Digital apps today, touches very little on the fundamental techniques of art, focusing more on the tools and bypassing proper appreciation of core fundamentals. These fundamental art appreciation and knowledge is what leads many traditional artists to excel in the process of art creation. The same is true for the digital drawing medium but it has been overlooked and relegated to traditional mediums. Paintology aims to bring back these core skills back into the digital medium and is the fist app in the world to demonstrate the power of these techniques and apply to the creation process.

Practically all of the popular drawing apps places too much emphasis on the digital tools leaving very little room for the development of the fundamental art techniques. The very techniques that has stood the test of time with the traditional mediums. There has been many discussions on this specific topic by the founder of the Paintology app, Dr. Ferdouse Khaleque. You can read some of the questions and answers from his profile on Quora, below.

If you are still not convinced with this unique approach to drawing and painting on the digital medium, you can see the many videos posted in the two Youtube channels below.

https://www.youtube.com/@Paintology

https://www.youtube.com/@Ferdouse/streams

Paintology – Paint Draw Learn – Apps on Google Play

Why doesn’t everyone draw like this?

This would be an obvious question as to why most choose tools over the fundamental art techniques taught by the Paintology app. There are a number of reasons for the way mainstream digital artists create their artwork. Firstly, most of the digital drawing apps, software and hardware have evolved over decades to provide tools originally meant for savvy technical people with expertise in the use of desktop PCs. The developers job of the software was to translate all the ‘traditional’ like features of the real world and translate to the equivalent digital medium. This meant that they were not focused on the art techniques but to bring all of those features and cram it into the digital world. This growth and development efforts have continued unabated and still exists today. This implies that the group of users using the software are more accustomed to using tools to create all the effects which was typically done by hand. For example, blending, coloring, creating shapes.

An artifact of this approach to creating digital art using the tools mean that the artwork is almost always perfect and looks computer generated. You can read more on this in a previous blog post written on this subject.

Digital Drawing & Painting – The Forgotten Skills – Paintology | Drawing App | Paint by Numbers

Most of the apps found in the Google and Apple stores supports this model of what a drawing tool should be and mimics much of the bigger software applications. This has been the case since the tablets for Apple and Google became more ubiquitous from a decade ago [ref]. This included a great opportunity for app developers to make drawing available to a bigger market. It seemed only normal for app developers to offer the path of least resistance, which was to copy many of the features already available on the bigger desktop applications [ref].

This reason alone sway many beginners in digital art to get immediately drawn into using the tools to make their artwork. The tools will dictate the outcome of the final art piece which is always appears digitally rendered. You can read a Quora topic that touches on this method of drawing.

The need for doing anything ‘manually’ disappears and their reliance on tools increase. Such tools include the need to do blending, shading, filling colors, auto corrections, layers and more. It is also the main reason why digital art looks always ‘computer’ generated. Using such tools require some technical proficiency which many traditional artists do not possess and they are immediately put off with the prospect of digital drawing.

You only have to see a few drawings to fully appreciate what ‘manual’ techniques can achieve over the reliance on tools. The example shown in Fig. 333 was made on the Samsung Note 10+ using just two brushes on the Paintology app. and was made in just over 2 hours. This level of details, will be impossible to achieve with tools alone and is again the reason why art techniques can far surpass the ability of an artist who is reliant on tools. You can watch a youtube video where I use the shade brush to make this fun drawing on the phone.

Most people viewing the artwork pieces made with the Paintology app confuses the drawings to be made with traditional materials. They can never guess that the drawing was done digitally, let along on a phone. The old adage, being a master of your tools will take you to great heights. The reality is that most digital artists are in actual fact a slave to the tools. They are not pushed to draw by hand from the beginning and will not have the insight and ability to draw by hand like shown. This is a result of their total dependency on the tools and a total reliance on them to create their art piece.

As an example, let’s look at the simple traditional method of drawing with a pencil and paper. Give these simple tools to a good experienced artists and a beginner. You can be confident that the experienced artist will produce something far beyond the capability of the beginner. They are both using the SAME set of tools to create the art pieces but yet one is superior in their ability to make a drawing. Many will immediately attribute this to talent but this talent does not come from nothing, it has to be trained, learnt and guided through practice. Those who do not practice the art of drawing will make premature presumptions to explain the differences. This is because they have no real idea on how the experienced artist was able to produce a drawing using the same tools. It is a combination of many things but can be distilled into the artists ability in interacting with the paper using the pencil. The experienced artist knows how to apply the right pressure of the pencil to get the lightness and darkness of the areas that they are drawing. They are also skilled in creating smoother drawing strokes, having made many drawings. They are also adept in understanding how to apply other methods of shading, like using their finger, tilting the pencil and possibly working in a different direction to the tooth of paper. Naturally, these skills have not been learnt or applied by the beginner, but with practice they will attain a similar line of thinking like the accomplished artist.

One of the biggest problems why beginners lack any skills or a desire to perform and improve are due to the negative preconceptions of art. A paper called the Desire, Passion, Dedication (DPD) explains some of the qualities that a beginner needs possess to rapidly increase their skills. In conjunction with the Paintology app, a user will be able to take this journey of learning art and techniques to great heights through the carefully designed tutorials.

The three traits (DPD) of mastering art skills – Paintology | Drawing App | Paint by Numbers

Having broken down digital art to the sum of it’s components, there was an intense drive to craft new tutorials and methods to make this journey easy for beginners. As a result, we have made significant changes to the way users at all levels master and acquire these crucial art techniques. This has led to the creation of the new revamped version of the Paintology drawing app which we will now elaborate.

Since many of the art techniques are not known to the average beginner artist it was decided to start from the ground up and look to enhance users engagement with the app. The original app which is currently live on the Google play store has a tutorials section. This section did not attract the level of interest that was expected. A reason for this is that users will make presumptions of what the app is about based on their personal experience. Most of the drawing apps do not provide a comprehensive array of tutorials like Paintology does. This expectation implies that many will turn to the drawing tools and start doodling and make their initial assessment.

Since the tutorials section is a rarity in most of the drawing apps we decided to take a different approach to engage users. The principle aim of Paintology is for users to master the basics of fundamentals of art which many will have limited knowledge of. The work around this was to build a points system where users will draw to build up points. However, the app goes beyond this by providing a new section called Gallery which showcases everybody’s artwork made with the app. This allows users to garner more points from other users of the app who rate, comment and like the drawings. This effectively brings more engagement with the app and permits users to see the great value of the tutorials and the app. Hopefully, users will feel more inspired and inclined to make drawings with Paintology.

This is a very similar process to painting and drawing in the traditional mediums. One needs to practice with the same tools and extend its capability to make great artworks. The same is true of the Paintology app.

The original app had tutorials were grouped under one section but in the new app they are classified according to the individuals level. Most will come in at the Beginner 1 level and work their way up through 10 levels Fig. . In each level users can consider themselves to be in the same year as other Beginner 1 level users. They will compete with each other through points and the leaderboard will reflect this as shown in Fig. dsafs. All users at higher levels will be positioned higher up the scale than users at lower levels, irrespective of the points they have achieved.

The tutorials are carefully crafted and tailored for each level and progressively gets more difficult as you go up the levels. This is very similar to going through levels in study and the subject material gets progressively more difficult and challenging. This method of teaching has not changed and remains the quintessential way of developing students understanding of a subject much more rapidly than other methods. We have introduced the same philosophy of teaching to the Paintology app with the aim of developing these core techniques that have remained hidden for so long. Now that we have the digital medium, these techniques are in some ways superior for teaching the core fundamentals because digital is easily repeatable and shareable through the social platforms. Traditional mediums can be more challenging to teach since there are no repeatable and straightforward way to convey the practices. The granularity of the digital medium along with exact tools selections makes it far more repeatable which even a novice user can follow.

We have researched and developed varying types of drawing methods to increase the individuals ability in picking up the core art techniques. These include Trace Drawing, Paint by Number, Pencil Drawing, Strokes Drawing, Block Coloring and more. A few of them are patent pending as they are completely unique approaches to allow anyone to draw. The Paint by Number is exactly as the name implies, this much loved method of painting with numbers that you can find in hobby shops Fig.. It can inspire people to take up art as they learn to improve their drawing strokes and coloring. The Pencil Drawing is another brush tool that is used in the Paintology app which has been found to make very realistic pencil like drawings. With this brush alone, a user can make photo realistic pencil drawings in a very similar fashion to real pencil drawing, Vid. 3.

To encourage new users who never felt that they had it in them to be able to draw, the Strokes Tutorial has been designed to show the ease at which anyone can learn to draw. Once they are over this hurdle, they can continue to do other fun drawing types such as Trace Drawing, Paint by Numbers, Pencil Drawing and more. Most who continue to follow this path will find themselves being hooked in this much loved hobby. They can work at their own pace and will be able to see other users in the same level who has posted their drawings to the Gallery. In this way, they can see other works and ask questions, interact with them and find ways to improve their own drawing abilities.

No longer do they look at the digital drawings made as too technical or unattainable, the skills required to get to the highest levels are made clear. The present thinking that digital tools are essential to digital art has been proven to be untrue by by the capabilities and techniques taught by the Paintology app. Most who embark in drawing and painting with these natural hands on skills will feel more comfortable in drawing with Paintology.

One of the big factors that precludes most traditional artists to cross to the digital medium is the preconceived ideas that digital drawing requires technical mastery. However, being able to draw with Paintology will bring back the traditional fundamental techniques of producing art. Many of the videos of drawings you find on the Youtube channels has been made with just one brush and much like the traditional way of drawing.

Gallery

The gallery is core to the Paintology app. It is where user post their freehand drawings or drawings they have made with one of the tutorials. The tutorials are key to the developmental art skills that users need to attain in order to become more skilled and hence go up the ladder of the levels. Some users will still attempt to do freehand but their progress will be somewhat mired by having to learn the techniques by themselves. There will be some who will understand the process of acquiring the techniques fairly quickly and will be able to improve by playing with the tools. The tools have all been designed to allow them to quickly access the colors, brush sizes and opacity. For them, it will be like giving them a pencil and paper for the first time and they quickly become adept with it. For all the others, these salient points are not so obvious and they can attain these skills through the many tutorials.

An example of the process of good drawing, requires the understanding of hardness and density settings of the brush and this may not be obvious the beginner user. If you think of a pencil having varying grades such as HB, 3B, 6B to give you the dark gradients, the same is true of the opacity/density settings of the app brush. This allows you exceptional control over the tones just like the gradients of the pencils. Couple this to the gray scale mode of the Paintology app and you have a method of drawing that can be faster than drawing with the same equivalent traditional materials.

Users can post their freehand or tutorials drawing directly from the canvas or save it in My Paintings and post from there. They can also include a youtube video of this drawing which they can post along with their drawing. In addition, they can add the appropriate tags associated with this drawing.

The Gallery section is crammed with features to enable a user to see drawings made in different levels, by individuals, by their country and much more. This will give the user to feel that they are part of a bigger community of users, all trying to achieve similar goals.

Community

The Community is another area where you can post and interact with other users similar to the Gallery. It is different to the Gallery as it encompasses drawings or paintings made with many other mediums including traditional. To be truly knowledgeable and good in art, one has to broaden your appreciation of all types of mediums and the community has been setup to do that. We have this platform in the previous app and proved very popular with the users. Users can not only interact with the posting but can also make friends with other users for chatting.

There are hundreds of postings already made in Community by users on many topics of art and have proved valuable to other users. With the new app, users will now be able to focus on drawing with the Paintology app and seeing their art skills rise up much more rapidly. The power of the Paintology app is such that learning in this digital medium can actually help you to improve your abilities in other mediums too.

In both Gallery and Community, the user is able to rate, review and comment on any of the postings. This can be used to good effect such as the Gallery where we can indirectly determine the quality of their drawings posted.. Initially, the users level of ability in drawing performance will be gauged manually to assess whether they can jump up a level. Over time, we expect to have accurate algorithms in place that will accurately assess the users suitability in going up a level. Naturally, it is expected that the rate of progress will vary by users and we will need to obtain sufficient data to tailor the algorithms to fit this data over time.

Tutorials

The tutorials section which was largely overlooked in the previous app has now been revamped in the new app. The tutorials are now divided into their respective levels and is based on the level that the users are currently in. In this way, the tutorials are always geared towards the levels that it serves. This will allow users to be more participative and engaged with the tutorials which is tied to the Gallery. This makes for a more engaging way for users to learn drawing as they are sharing and providing feedback. Points will be awarded to those users that post to the Gallery with clocking up further points it receives from comments, ratings, likes and views.

The freehand section of the Gallery can also be a good way to get the necessary points to go up the leaderboard but it is better served after having acquired essential skills from doing tutorials. Again, it will be over some time when we can make a determination of how the combined Gallery/Tutorials will perform with users.

Leaderboard

The leaderboard has been designed to encourage users to compete with each other and feel more inspired to continue the path of drawing with the app. Points are obtained through being active on the app and more importantly by completing a drawing and posting to the Gallery section. This will help the users to qualify for them to go up the ten levels of the ladder.

Like the other features such as Gallery, there are options for users to see their ranking based in the country they reside. In addition, they can see their individual levels in their own category of level such as Beginner 1. The world ranking is naturally the hardest to achieve but some of the ambitious users will be inclined to compete at this category.

Summary

The Paintology app has now been on the Google play store close to six years with over 40 iterations of the app. The founder Dr. Ferdouse Khaleque applied his skills in the traditional medium and translate the foundational skills to the digital medium of creating art. This spurred the growth of the Paintology app that exists today.

This approach to drawing is practically unknown in the mainstream digital art world. All have followed the path of digital art creations since it’s birth several decades ago. This includes the development of the software applications and the hardware that supports it. Now that phones and tablets have become more ubiquitous,

This has allowed the founder to develop and produce new features that has turned digital drawing on it’s head. These features are the very foundation of what fundamental art techniques are and allows for artwork that goes beyond peoples typical understanding. The Paintology app has been further refined with the upcoming launch of the new app. The approach used in creating digital drawings and paintings with the Paintology app will now reach a broader audience. This will bring more awareness of the important fundamentals of art applied to the digital medium.

Paintology – Paint Draw Learn – Apps on Google Play