Behind the Scenes Podcast- Brushes, Brushes, Brushes

Half Heidelberg, half Hobart, that is the brush library for 5.4. Thing is I'm not even a brush maker, I just bloody fell into it. Like out of necessity, yeah necessity, I just had to pick it up. The interesting thing is though, I kind of like it. We never had someone be able to sit there and just constantly push the engine, see what they can do. It was crazy to come in with raw material basically, which was this first set of ideas and then watch it get so much better because we passed it around. Didn't occur to me actually that we have actually been just bouncing ---- back and forth for years. Oh yeah, I was always feeling like I wanted to reach out and stay in touch with you because I was always admiring stuff you guys were doing. Thanks man. Always, remember at that first Lightbox came over and he was just like, wow you guys, this is awesome, the animation, this is amazing, the new brush stuff is amazing. That was when you had the color dynamics came in and I was like, per stroke, yes, you know, and all that kind of stuff. I was like, this is how it should be. And we were just talking about geeky stuff together and just, but always, you know, because we worked together way back when, but prior to that, I was already such a fan because I was using the app. Wrong. You know, I even did a couple of, you know, internal projects in Procreate. No way. Yeah, because it was faster and easier. I had to deadline and I was like, I'm going to knock this out. Which is just, you know, that's fine. You use what works, but we'd stay in touch all those years. And it was amazing that this opportunity opened up because it was, could not have been a better moment to just finally collaborate on something really big. Except that when I was talking to you guys about working on it, I was like, so how many brushes? Because Claire was like, well, I was like, oh, it's the whole library. Okay, cool. No problem. No problem. See you later. I'm going to get busy now. I remember when Claire said to me, because I wasn't aware that you guys had had a chat. I think the like box. Yeah, I walked right over and saw Nate and Claire and I was like, guys, I love what you're doing. And to come back around here and now be here with you guys and working, I think it's sort of the most natural thing. Because even though I wasn't working directly with you all that time, we were always in the peers. Right. Yeah. And we always had the same goals and the same values about like, what really matters is drawing, painting the community, totally making cool stuff for them. And we want them to, but it's like, it's not that hard. It's not that complicated, right? Right. Like from our point of view, it's a very simple thing. You just, you know, you try and be authentic, you know, live your values, but in today's world, not everyone's doing that. We'll start the AI train. Yeah. But it's interesting, like listening to our community has been a thing that we've been wanting to do for a long time. The thing for us is like, we have a laundry list of things that we need to like work through. There's some things that are big ticket items that just take time to work through as well. Like, you know, one of the reasons we wanted to get you on board was like, you know, over the years, it's been James has been our sole brush maker. Which is insane by the way. Apart from like a few brushes here and there. And so James is also leading product design and all the other things. And it's kind of like, well, we've never had someone be able to sit there and just constantly push the engine, see what they can do. Well, the thing is I'm not even a brush maker. I just bloody fell into it. Like out of necessity, I would just have to pick it up. Fun thing is though, the interesting thing is though, I kind of like it. It's kind of therapeutic, you know what I mean? It's a different sort of design. Like instead of designing something that is more functional, it's more expressive and emotional. So I kind of like, like back in 1.6, you know, getting out on the driveway with like big sheets of paper and spray painting to make the texture. Oh, it's a lot of fun. It's so fun. Yeah. When we released five, that's where we added wet mix. We added a heaps of other things to it, but we left that kind of library. What we changed like eight brushes or 10 brushes or something like that to really take control of that engine. And we left the rest as like the classic library. And there's a few little updates here and there. And then since then, we haven't really had the time to overhaul it. And then when you join us, we're like, all right, we can overhaul the library and take advantage of the actual, where the engine's up to now and show people what's possible with the current engine. Best part was I didn't have to do it. Except you still came in and built a bunch of stuff. We were working together, but jamming together. It was a full on jam. It really was there. Like, it's a good analogy. There's a musicality to the whole thing if you have people in a small group improvising with music and somebody creates a melody or a hook or whatever, and someone's like, I got an idea for that. This will make it slightly better, or here's a way to build on that or whatever. And it was crazy to come in with raw material, basically, which was this first set of ideas and then watch it get so much better because we passed it around. I've never done that. I've never had that kind of jamming. That's how we've worked for years. Totally, but we had a few calls. You were in Germany. And we're set for like 45 minutes. And there was like three hours later, we're just geeking out. And then we're like, there's not many people in the world we can do this with, is there? We're just there geeking, yeah, let me change this setting. And then we're just sending the brush over the pipe. And it's like, try that out. And it's like, oh, that's cool. And then we're just like this back and forth. And then it's like, all right, I need to go to sleep now. It's still the start of your day. And so you've got the whole day to keep progressing. Which I would. But that was really funny because if you're on a call with somebody, and there's total silence, but you don't notice it because you're both working. So you'd be like, wait, yeah, because on Slack, I'd be like, here, I drop off a version of it. You'd be like, oh, let me, I have an idea. But then both of us are sitting there with our iPads, and it's total quiet because we're just on the call. But it's just for five minutes. And then, oh, here, try this. And it was like, we're in a room together building a brush. That was for the pen. And some other pen stuff we were doing. It was really, really cool. I've never, no, never once have I had a person to bounce anything off of. I was always just doing it in a vacuum. So that was really cool. I mean, it's, that's, it's, that's interesting. It's like the way that we make software, everything is, is it's not, it's not one person sort of ego or whatever. It's everyone wants and sees the objective of like, how do we make this the best thing we can make it? And everyone falls in. It's almost like sharpening one another. You know, you kind of come out of it sort of sharpened. But everyone has to have the same vocab. So like, if you don't understand how that thing is built or how the sausage is made or whatever, you can't really contribute. And that was the difference was that we all know how this stuff works. And even though we know what the options are, there are so many options for how to make something do X, Y, or Z. You might be like, I can't figure out how to make this more or less fill in the blank. And someone else will be like, I have an idea, adjust this. And that's what I was looking for. Yeah. More grit, less grit, blah, blah, blah. Totally. And that's cool that we can speak that language and it is really specialized. It is. It's very, yeah. I sort of take it for granted when you do it all the time, but. Yeah. But we want more people to experience that. Yeah, I know. It's fun. It's fun. Like drawing is fun. I mean, that's obviously why we're all here, but the other part to it of like, you go back to the old masters where they would like mix their pigments with the right type of linseed oil and, you know, that, that they had this secret formulas that they would have. It's kind of part of the process as a maker, you know, you want to make your own tool. They had their favorite brushes and they modified brushes and they, this is not a new thing. Right, right, right. It's just a digital version of what's been going on for hundreds of years. You know what I mean? I think a good example of that in the process was also the watercolors because the watercolors. They're insane by the way. We don't have a watercolor engine necessarily, but we've got wet mix where we have ways of, and there's like a few different tricks to kind of like a few different veins that you can create the brushes through. Like there's the subtract method, there's wet mix kind of high dilution, low charge. There's all this, and these are all geeky kind of terms for the brush thing, but like, it was funny, like Trady knows, like I think class, I mean, first one's like subtract and I was like, I've got this watery brush. Just have a look at this. And you were like dissecting and going, interesting. And then like, I think it was a week or so later, it's like all these other brushes based on a similar kind of way of putting a brush together. I was like, holy crap, like these ones. And now the washes for we're making a new set for dreams. Oh yeah, this is inside info here, secret stuff. For dreams, for animators and like the old school, like wash backgrounds and stuff like that. We've got some brushes for that using again, another similar technique that helps kind of keep that dilution up. And yeah, I was sitting on the couch with Oliver. I cracked open the build, checking out the new goodie bag that you sent through. And he was just watching me as I was, you know, drawing away and just went, wow, that looks real. And I'm like, does man that you're not wrong. It looks real. It was like a bit of a moment of like still the same engine, but whatever you cats had done, it sort of took it to another level. In fact, some, I think some of the early beta testers are under the impression that we've actually changed stuff under the hood. Actually, no, it's just the team have just found new ways to sort of maxing out what's possible. Although there are some fantastic changes in there, true. Really, really. And then they're, they're small in some ways. And then in other ways, they're huge. And I think that's one of the amazing things about working here was I had been sitting on these ideas for like seven years, a little things you could do with brush settings. And I sat down my first meeting with Claire and I was like, Hey, here's some things I wanted to maybe try. And she's like, uh-huh. Two hours later, I'm just sitting in on the couch and she walks over and she's like, I want to dump this build onto your iPad of procreate. And there's already half the list taken care of. And I started building new stuff and I'm like, is this going to make it into the, into five, four? And she's like, oh yeah, yeah. And we're just going to, we're just going to do it. I've been sitting on this list. What else can we do? You know? And so now we're talking to Lloyd and through that process, there was so many times like on some of those calls, like, and we would, because there are limitations in there, but we're like, I'm not going to break that limitation one day. And where they're going, yours, they're just adding it to the list. And then we can chat with Lloyd and go like, cause Lloyd's, I think through this process, they developed a passion for this. He wants to. I don't think you've lost it. You know what I mean? Like it's just like now it's time to come back and have the time. He was king. He was king. We were one of our quarterlies and we asked Lloyd, like when we're asking ourselves, what gets our fire going? What do you want to do? What's, what's going to set, you know, your, your sort of heart in flame. And he was like, I want to do a whole new rev of the brush engine. I'm like, oh, this is going to be fun. It's going to be fun. You should let that dude loose on it. I don't know what he's going to do, but when you cats get together, it's going to be fun. As soon as I walked in the door this time around, we were talking for maybe 30 seconds and he's like, Hey, check this out. And he's, he was telling me about something that he had seen. It wasn't even painting related. It was actually, it was an audio thing, but he immediately like made a connection for how that could apply to brushes. Oh, like motion filtering. And it was so cool the way he was describing it. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice brain. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's, he's been getting into the audio stuff and there's some crop, like how the creators are creating music there. There's a, there is a kind of a wire that's how motion was actually noise reduction. It was, it was essentially a noise reduction room. It's way more comfortable. I don't know. I think they're seeing Lloyd's passion for us getting jazzed up about like what we could do if we had a little bit more in the engine as well. And that also then goes to what could other people create with the engine if we keep adding these sorts of things as well. That's actually at the end of the day, that's really the thing. I'm really glad to be here making brushes. It's the greatest thing, but there's this massive community of people who make insane stuff. Yeah. And one thing I want people to do more is go and find that stuff. And I think it's just a, a lot of people, I think download an app and they're like, here it is. That's it. They don't realize that there's this support system for it out there. Yeah. Um, so many resources, so many, so many like insane stuff. And they're good too. Like I always get surprised, you know, when I'm sort of scrolling through my feed or whatever, and you see like this wicked calligraphy brush or something like, yeah, what the, how did they do that? The first time I saw that guy, Nick is, I think he goes by Snooze1, the bubble, he made this iridescent bubble brush. Yeah. That was cool. I said, what is this? And yeah, but that's coming from the art community. They're using the engine to make these insane tools. And, um, yeah, more people need to go out, find that stuff, buy it. But the other thing about that too, is I wouldn't be sitting here if it weren't for that people buying that way back in the day, people were buying my brushes. Um, if, if you're buying other artists stuff, the artists are making stuff for you for other artists and it drives them to keep making more, which just pushes the tools forward. Exactly. And then we'll do our job of making the engine better. It's an amazing, yeah, like Patrick, the, from Spiderverse, the movies, when I was talking to him, he's like, if it weren't for brushes, how would we have found and discovered all these ways of rendering and drawing that look different for designing, uh, the look of that movie is like, it's the brushes are there. It's a rake, it's a halftone pattern, it's whatever. But that doesn't always come from us, the product makers, it comes from the making those tools. But one of the things we added too, which we didn't talk about is alpha threshold, which you're really nerding out, but no anti-aliasing. So if you want to have everything just be on or off, totally hard edge, any brush can do it. And good for coloring. Like, as in, you know, when you're filling with color, that sort of thing, it's now perfect. You don't worry about that thresholding thing of, of color drop or whatever. I didn't know how much I needed it. No, now that we have it, it's like, oh, without this shop as well now, just the optics of it. If you work super high res, like on a comic, if you're doing something 4,500, uh, you know, pixels per inch and you're drawing a comics page with an anchor that's, and you set it to the alpha threshold, just flip it on and draw it. And then when you're printing it, sizing it down, it's so crisp, so tight, but yeah. Spotting blacks and filling in blacks, drag and drop, boom, boom, boom. Well, that's been on our list for years, but I was like, ah, it might make that much of a difference. And you came in, you were like, nah, I think it's a big difference, a big, big, uh, a big thing. And yeah, now I get it. But I want to see now, so what's the brush making community going to do with that? And with all the jitter stuff, what are they going to do? And then we're going to see a whole bunch, thousands of new brushes. The textures, I think we were very much going hard on, um, inks and stuff like that for threshold, but like, how does it work with gritty textures and grunge and that sort of stuff where you want it to be like very graphic and rough and harsh? Well, that's cool. Cause we used it a little bit. There's other, there are other categories in there. It's not just natural media, which of course there's a ton of that, but I love that there's just purely digital stuff. You know what? That was one of my favorite sets, just, just at last minute where we were like, Digi is fun, but it doesn't feel like I can really, you know, make, uh, artwork without being quite stylistic. Cause those brushes, you know, the set was very stylistic. And then the last minute we cooked just this beautiful set of just workhorse Digis. I'm like, man, I'm having fun. And it, and it really, it fills that gap of like, yes, we're not simulation. This is not even inspired. This is bonkers digital. Yeah. And that's also this amazing thing I've seen happen in the digital art community over the years is brushes have influenced style. Good call. You know, and, and it's with the brush, people discover a way to work that becomes a signature style for them or makes their workflow easier, faster, whatever. But it's really cool to see that we can shape some of that. Everyone's looking to find their style. You know what I mean? Like, I'm still looking. I haven't found it just, you know what I mean? Like everyone's looking for their style. I suppose again, that the tools can really help amplify that. You know, it's like people who draw with a certain pen and they're like, oh, that feels like what I've always wanted. Or if this forces you to draw a different way because of limitations or whatever it is. And then you develop something out of that. But all that's, whenever I hear people say brushes don't matter, I'm like, you need to put some context around that. Cause tell me what you mean. And what they're really trying to say is that I could give you a stick. And if you have good drawing ability, you can do something with it, but that's not the same thing. Don't say brushes don't matter. It's not the full story because you can't, you know, there's so many contributions to an artifact that's finished. You can't, if you remove one of them, it's going to, it's not going to have the same impact. And the brushes themselves, I mean, that's literally where the rubber meets the road. That's the brush mark itself. That's a pretty important part of the stab. I mean, people like to make these kinds of sweeping statements. It's a bit gatekeeping for me. I think, you know, just use what you like, do what you like. And if you're having fun and the end result looks beautiful, you've nailed it. One of those things where like one brush isn't going to make you a brilliant artist. But it can change the way that you express yourself. And I think that's an interesting part or the kind of feel that you're coming across with your abilities and that sort of thing. Whereas, and it can feel accessible to some people because some brushes have enough expression in them that it actually encourages them to keep going to become that artist in the future or to become, you don't even become an artist, just enjoying what you're doing. Especially when they feel nice. Like when you guys were sending early builds and I was reviewing, I remember I'd be sitting there on the couch and we had a whole gaggle of people and I'm just sort of messing, especially the brushes, man. I was like, I'm messing around with them and I'd hear James, James. I'm like, oh, sorry. What? And you know, we'd talk and I'm like, hmm. Getting lost in that, in those tools also kind of, you know, that's part of the, like the style that you get at the end, but it's also the joy of making something, you know, getting lost. It's so fun to not even make anything specific. Just to, just, I don't know why that's so satisfying. Like you had one night where you had your whole iPad was just covered in test markers. Yep. And I remember walking past with my coffee. I'm like, holy, is that the latest set? And you're like, and I'm like, wow. Like it looked beautiful too, even though it was just. But it was also just playing with colors and stuff like that. Trying to get that, that richness to the markers. I think that was one thing that we really worked on. The blend mode thing is the thing that we're like, that's the limitation that we kind of hit, but we now want to go, how do we surpass that? We have good ideas for that. Yeah, we do. The fact that you have libraries now and a whole new way of organizing stuff and that you can back up your brushes and you don't lose them. My God, the whole iCloud thing. Jesus, you know what? I would ---- my pants with that one. You want to know why? It's like the core of the product. The whole point of Procreate is like you mark the screen. It's a very simple experience, right? We were in control of the storage behind those brushes. So it's a very safe place to be when you're in Procreate. Everything's inside the bundle. As soon as we remove that storage layer now, we're abdicating the responsibility of the storage of the brushes. Man, that was a scary proposition and credit to Lloyd and the team. Jesus Christ. That really concerned me. That was a year of work. We were given probably more time to do the brushes because we were doing so much testing on how it works. We were going to ship it like at the beginning of this year and we were like, no, we really need to be careful because as soon as the storage is now in the cloud, what happens when, you know, if you have two iPads, you modify one here as a duplicate to try and mesh the settings of the brush, you know, and there's so many permutations. And again, credit to Lloyd who did so much of the heavy lifting on that one because from where we were, where it was like, all right, all brushes now are going to be upgraded, thrown into the cloud and we'll just sync them back and forth. That scary journey to then get to where we are now, where it's like, man, it feels like magic. Yeah. It works. It feels like magic. It looks good. But also your brushes are now safe. That's a huge thing. You're not going to lose anything if you're syncing. The amount of support team, the amount of people who are like, I had a problem, so I just deleted the app. We're like, oh no. It's the worst thing we hear. Yeah, because it's not their fault. They don't understand because most of the things are ubiquitously in the cloud these days. We get it, but finally we can bring it to the table. That's going to be fun. Please still don't delete your apps though, because artworks aren't backed up to the cloud just yet. We are working on it. Not yet. No, but that's just a thing that's obviously... It happens, yeah. But the other thing is you can now organize brushes differently. And I think these are little things some people won't even know is a thing, but libraries, that's a whole other amazing opportunity to not have 400 brushes in a set if you don't want to. You can have the archives that you can go to and then pull things out and have your go-to set. I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with this. Or your favorite brush makers, you're getting brushes off having a library from each of those brush makers. Yes, and they can also, now the brush makers themselves, further organize stuff for the customer and make it much easier to navigate. That's a big deal. That's going to be a really big deal. And that gesture, it's so procreate to pinch out, see the libraries, tap on the library you want. There you are. To drag and drop from different libraries. I still want to make that a bit faster. I feel like, you know, because as you guys are throwing stuff and I've got now like 20 libraries and I'm sort of juggling through a bit, but yeah, it's like moving it out. You have to kind of do this weird dance. What if we just do a simple... So used to it now, I guess, yeah. Oh, really? Well, but no, it is a learning curve, yeah. Yeah. But this is like the first version of this new way of organizing brushes and everything. So there's also like a little Easter egg as well. We saw brush makers were putting emojis into their titles of brush sets and stuff like that. And then we have provided them with... Trying to embrace it. We gave them a custom set of icons. That was our first kind of doing this. And we saw the emoji thing. We're like, also allowed emojis to be designed. So now if you rename a brush and put an emoji in it, the emoji actually becomes the icon and have a thing. So you actually get a bit of color coding kind of happening in the brush sets now as well. We wanted to make it... It was kind of getting hacked in. So you had multiple icons everywhere. It's like it makes it cleaner. But they're still there. But you try and embrace what the community is pushing for in some ways. I think that's the interesting part of always trying to, you know, move with the community. And when we were going down the line for 5.4, we were like, and what about, what about like, hang on, we actually got to ship this. Customers kind of want it. Otherwise you wind up five years later, you still haven't. Still haven't delivered. We already delayed it a fair bit. So like once we ship 5.4, it's gonna be fun. It's going back and sort of, all right, what did we actually cut? Let's bring that back and start getting another update on the thing. The stuff that was added for 5.4, just on the, on the, um, brush creation side, the different, now the new things for jitter and for alpha. We talked about spacing jitter. Right. All of it. Yes. All of these things means that while we continue to build, procreate, we continue to add stuff. In the meantime, all these brush makers, we've already been in love with it, buying the things that they make. They're going to push it. They're going to make all kinds of stuff we never really even thought about. That's the fun part though, isn't it? When you see people making stuff that we never thought could happen. And then you go, Oh, Hey, there's an idea. And then you build on that and it keeps going, but that's going to be this whole new thing. And hopefully also people who've already been using procreate, they get this new set. So now they've got the classic set. They've got the set they've known and loved. They've got new stuff. Maybe, maybe it'll entice them to just open the settings and start playing and realize, Oh shoot, I can... Especially with that per brush pressure curve. That can be just a nice little one to... Simple one to make it feel better how you draw. Totally. And maybe they're like, Oh, I kind of like these markers. Are there more markers on the marketplace? And they go out and find more markers. And are there more watercolors? And then it's just like, Holy cow. Look at all these tools. I think a lot of people just haven't done that. So we're helping them to... This is already the best. I'm just going to say this because it's true. But this, this is the most powerful brush studio. Oh yeah. No, I think that's, I think that's legitimate. I think we put a lot of, you know, a lot of attention on trying to make... But with Lloyd coming back in and then we start saying, well, now we're going to go to like this level. Right. That's the beauty of a company. You know what I mean? It's like that improv thing. Yes. And you know about that? Totally. You come in and you say, Hi, my knee hurts. I go, too bad. Get out of here. That's not a good improv sketch. Oh, really? Tell me more. Oh, too bad. What about the other knee? Yeah. You know, keep it going. But that's how it's... Similar to the jam session, right? It's like, what if? What if? Like, that's a cool idea. What if? That's, that's a fun place to be. Yeah. It's like that harmony of engineering. It doesn't, like there's the creative, they're both creative things that are kind of like in a balance with each other. And sometimes one tugs, not always in balance. One tugs one way. It's deliberately imbalanced. Like, because each contribution varies. You know? Yeah. But you have to have some mild understanding or interest in the other. So if you're more sort of living in this world, but you're also curious about the other, how to understand how it works, then you make stuff faster and better together. It's like, if I didn't, when I was a kid, mess around on the Apple IIe with BASIC. Holy ----, no way. Of course. I was like, you know, doing those little... I thought that was fun times. Yeah. Like head north. I was making little games for myself, asking questions. My brother sit down. Well, that's fun. Yeah. Go fight the dragon. And then learning a little bit of HTML. And then like having a tiny, tiny understanding of... Yeah, it helps. A little bit. Right. And vice versa. Right? So people like Lloyd, if they're interested in drawing and that, it's easier to say, oh, you know, we have a culture where the engineers like to draw and the people who are like drawing, like to code. But then when people actually do that, the results are... Right. Sounds good on paper, but in real life, it's kind of magic. Yeah. And it's hard to put that together. I'm excited about to explore now is we're going to go back into that while we get five, four, and everyone gets to start playing with what we've got there and brush markers. Yeah, we're not finished. That will be happening and we'll be moving on to having our own fun, pushing to the next iteration of what can that look like? Yeah. And then just keep that cycle moving, pushing what's possible.