So today’s the first real attempt at using this app. I’ve watched Goro Fujita’s intro video twice, at least the first part where he introduces painting. I couldn’t find an overview video – and have my own ideas about how I’d introduce this. I found Goro’s style a bit fast-paced. I think I’m accustomed to my own style of introducing Photoshop or Illustrator to new students illustration students, where I spend a lot more time talking about the layout of the menus. It can be a little overwhelming otherwise, and Goro just jumps right in to painting, and at one point uses the phrase “I’m going to be increasing the cognitive load” – jeez, man. Way to make me feel like a dumb human. This is where a bit of sales finesse comes in handy, taking my go-to example from my days as a travel agent where an Australian superstar Area Leader named Aaron advised us to use “tricky” instead of “hard”. So you spin that on ‘cognitive load’, and make it a little less daunting / more playful by saying “this is going to get a bit trickier up ahead.” It gives people the chance to get excited about the challenge of tricky business rather than their cognition being overloaded.
I’d like to see a little more time spent on each tool and what it can do, so as a student I can pause and have the time to get acquainted with the attributes as well as the hotkeys, one at a time. But every artist has their own style of doing things, and not everyone has spent a lot of time breaking down learning styles. There’s something to that- you want to introduce new things in a way that gives people time to feel each thing out their own way. Instead I had to digest everything in bulk and go through the anxious process of trial-and-erroring my way around. It’s not necessary. It could be done a lot more fluidly. Once each item is covered, it’s then a nice option to throw in an example of how you like to use that tool, because it gives people a chance to learn something new from your style as well as how they might use it. It adds a bit of excitement.
There’s a lot going on in Quill, but I can see the advantage in how it’s designed a lot like those Adobe apps (Photoshop and Illustrator), with the way the layers menu is referred to constantly. The ‘hot keys’ are not intuitive at first grasp, though I can see how they may get to that point with a lot of practice. The environment is wonky and I find I’m moving it way more than I like, which is disorienting. I want to have the option to pin it in place. I also can’t scale it by squeezing both ‘grab’ triggers as it claims on the layout screen.
It definitely feels like a 2D drawing program, which is awkward, in 3D space, as well as frustrating. I don’t know how colour is going to work. I do love what it can do with the drawing style in the brush strokes though, and this is where I see myself having the most fun with it. But the colour-filling does seem like it’s going to be an issue for me. Wesley Allsbrook really works with the colour, but I’ll have to take another look at her work to see how she incorporates her line-work. I know she does balance both, and I wish she had a few tutorials up because it’s her style that lends most to my own. I think the nature of Quill is to figure out your own style of 2D artwork but as a hybrid version of itself, where you’re constantly thinking about depth without it hindering your natural workflow too much. I outlined a cat then tried to colour it. The colouring felt tedious, but as far as digital painting goes, there’s nothing new about that. I didn’t actually try erasing parts of a stroke yet, so I’ll try that next as it would help a lot in creating a flat, whole shape for colour, as opposed to the colour shapes being blotches painted at various depths. With the cat, for instance, it looked okay until I attempted to add stripes, but I couldn’t paint them in without some overlap of some of the background colour blotches. Next I tried doing the colour a little further back from the outline, to make room for more layers of colour detail like stripes, but now this meant a definite discrepancy between the colour and the outline.
I just rewatched Dear Angelica. Without attempting to emulate Allsbrook’s style exactly, I think it’s a good idea to take a page ora two from her book. For one thing, her style appeals to me (more so that Fujita’s, although that’s a subjective opinion based entirely on personal taste and his work is truly impressive, it’s just too weighted in commercial appeal for my liking). For another, I feel Allsbrook and I have a kindred spirit in our art… watching her imagination unfold around me is like watching my mind as a child, before it was harnessed by my own impositions that I must draw ‘this’ or ‘that’ way.
What works so well about Allsbrook’s style:

– She is so free and fluid in her strokes.
– She’s takes up room, and lots of it. She pushes the strokes far out into the distance, unafraid of the space. She dominates and envelopes the space.
– Her colour palettes are surprising, vibrant and original. She’s not afraid to work with colour, and weilds it to work for her without concern of what a colour should be by real-world standards. This makes her images both powerful and playful.
– She uses line-work in a gestural way, just enough to form the hint of a frame or contour of an object or character. The rest of the shape is filled in with varying, though typically wide, tapered strokes of colour.
– She seems to be drawing in perspective. I wish I could see some of these images as models in Quill, but it doesn’t appear to me that, for instance the car and the tanks, were drawn to make sense of 3D space. Rather they seem like drawings done using the skills of two-point perspective. Because the viewer has a fixed view of the scene, they’d never know the difference.
I actually just noticed a similar effect myself this afternoon, when drawing an ellipse in Quill. When I ‘grabbed’ the shape and held it up in front of me, I realized I’d drawn it very much as an oval, though from where I was standing at the time, it looked like a round ellipse in perspective.
– Back to the line-work: Allsbrook uses colour in her lines, something I’ve always struggled with. I’m really not sure why I’ve always had an issue with adjusting to the use of line colour. My guess is that it’s because there’s something so satisfying and definitive about a black stroke. But it really serves a purpose in blending in with the scene while adding structure.

Next day:
Before I forget, yes – it’s possible to use the eraser to erase parts of a stroke rather than the entire shape of the stroke. That’s good news for the rendering process, though it can’t be good for output, depending on what you want to do with it, ie. elements for a game or something. As far as static image goes, it seems fine.
I watched Goro Fujita’s introduction to animation, and tried it out a bit myself. But then decided that my time is better invested now in getting acquainted with the painting techniques. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
– there are two types of brushes, each with their own variants. There’s the 3D type brush (cylinder or square shaped) and using this means you can in fact ‘sculpt’ with Quill. And it’s a lot more fluid than the Hull brush, albeit more akin to painting strokes than sculpting out a convincing sense of mass. But it did bring that Tilt Brush painter / performa Anna something to mind, in that in her Ted Talk, she attempted to coin a name for the new 3D painting movement as “volumism”. It sounded hokey to me off the bat, but now I think I get it. It’s very much a combined way of thinking for the artist – in trying to create the sense of volume, you are both sculpting the shape while painting with strokes. It’s hard and will definitely take some getting used to, but there’s still something intuitive about it.
Technical hangups: I kept unconsciously / involuntarily hitting the ‘grab’ trigger with my right middle as I drew, which caused the squirrel I was working on to swish around in the scene this way and that. Noted that I will have to work on ebbing this motor-reflex out of my practice, and only refer to it when deliberately called upon. It also took me a while to figure out how to turn off the setting where the 3D contour lines of the stroke shape are visible. It’s a handy feature but not always desired. It’s the third grid option in on the menu. It alternates between contour view, weird blue view where my squirrel became a faintly illuminated plasma ghost, so I’ll have to figure out the advantage of that feature later. Third toggle just shows the strokes with no contouring.

It took a while to build the volumetric shape of the squirrel. My thought is that it would make sense to know beforehand how much you’re planning on making use of a particular asset / object. What’s it for, and where’s it going to be in terms of the camera? How much of it will we see, and how much time is being spent on it? These decisions will play a major part in the ‘economy’ of the production process, like a budget that needs mapping out beforehand. It would be the film equivalent of building real props vs. ikea versions. Something along those lines.
Using the 3D contour outline helped a lot in building out the volumetric shape of the squirrel, but I did find myself falling into, for me, a very classic trap. I spent more type fixated on building up what a convincing squirrel would look like rather than spending time making stylistic choices. This might seem fine as I’m only just familiarizing myself with the medium and tools, but it does feel like the larger impediment I’m facing is not allowing, or interfering with, the chance of still achieving the ‘effect’ or impression of the squirrel by virtue of my own gestural strokes. It’s a bigger leap, but it also might just be an out-of-shape muscle. If I can make a more direct connection with my ability to create impressions through gestures, it would mean I could focus more on stylistic attributes like the vibrancy of stroke and colour harmony.
It’s working on that (next) where I really felt the difference. Here I had a real looking squirrel – not highly detailed but her shape and cuteness where definitely coming through. But the whole shape was one colour – a muddy brown / grey, no less. When I attempted to colourize it, that made it a little cooler looking but also limited and a bit dull. Also the colourizing doesn’t work as you’d expect. It paints colour across the entire length of a stroke, like a straight jag of colour, rather than directly where you’ve applied it. It has to always move in a line, it seems. Think of spray-paint, where you can add colour in whichever way you please, and then now think of it as having a mechanism built into your shoulder that forced your arm to move in vertical motions across any surface. It’s something like that.
I then tried to channel my inner Wesley Allsbrook. I have a lot of admiration for her style, and how she paints with line and gesture while having a strong grasp on colour palettes. Allsbrook is really highlighting the areas I need to work on. The trick will be to learn from her while retaining what it is I’m good at in terms of capturing that shape and cuteness I’m good at. I need a fusion of the two technical toolsets.
My second pass at the squirrel worked out better. I filmed myself throughout, which helped in coaching myself. It’s turning out to be an effective way of getting thoughts out and acting on them. As I’m drawing while talking, it’s extremely similar to what I’d been doing for years as an instructor, so it feels very familiar to me to be working like this. The main difference being, I’m performing the tutorial for myself, learning as I go, rather than delivering prepared methods. It made me realize that I must have spent a lot of time thinking-out-loud in a stream-of-consciousness way a lot of the time. I think I was always aware of that, and was never entirely sure whether I had their captive interest or, especially on account of it typically being a course taught in the evenings, I was putting them to sleep. Although I’m pretty sure I know the answer is a bit of both.
The second attempt at the squirrel had me really “channelling Wesley”. I was making a point to try to think like her, to hone her instincts where I feel the disparity in my own: colour schemes, confidence in gesture and size of stroke. Going for expression over ‘realness’, not getting caught up in the details. This time it worked out a little better on account of the following improvements:
– I prepared a layer for my colour scheme beforehand (in spite of locking it, I still managed to paint all over it, so careful for that)
– I focused on one side of the body, rather than filling out both sides. I figured that if I were to need access to the side beyond the 2D profile, then I could just add it in later. With each object in the scene neatly packaged in its own folder and colour scheme, with well-organized, labeled layers, that shouldn’t be an issue. It’s what I’m used to anyway.
– I tried to get more contour mileage out of long strokes full of movement, allowing for an energy of gesture.
– I varied up the stroke sizes
– I used some splashes of colours that ‘pop’ and pushed myself to use them in ways I wasn’t comfortable with. This is a box I need to get out of, so the push is important. I was satisfied with how those splotches turned out.
For the tail (which I plan to animate): I followed Fugita’s teaching in painting out a few strokes for the fur, then duplicated them and had a full bushy tail in no time. But I’d forgotten by then how to do the animation, so that’s the plan for tomorrow morning.

The major takeaway is that I need to use my line-work in a way I’m not accustomed to, but once I get used to it, I might have a lot of potential in using this tool. I need to escape the constraints of using line-work for black outlines alone, and start actually painting with gesture of line. This is where my practice needs to be focused.

I wanted to explore the background, so I zoomed out as far as I could, making the squirrels nearly microscopic, and found this mesmerizing. I mean Tilt Brush has nothing on this, even when you jimmy-rig the scripting (thanks, Danny Bitman). Quill just goes on and on for what seems like forever. I immediately felt a sense of Godliness, but not in the omnipotent way. Entirely in the thrill of creation. The only thing I can compare it to was what it had initially felt like when I was Five and my dad set me up with Mouse Paint on his computer. That. Now this. The heart of the Five year old inside me burst a little.
Here’s what I discovered off the bat:
– A bigger room space would really come in handy. Tomorrow I’ll have to see if I can adjust the sensors to give me as much room scale as possible, so I can make the most of what I have. My drawing hand kept bumping in to the boundary mesh, which invariably caused a hick-up in my strokes.
– I went for the largest ratio disparity possible, in terms of how small I could scale down my squirrels on their little floating Cartesian grid, versus how large a stroke size I could paint with, and from as far a distance away from the grid as my physical confines would permit. I of course attempted to paint one ginormous streak while spinning in a 360, but found after a few attempts that computer says no. The streak would abruptly stop at any given point.
Then I got into the flow of it. In my suddenly very tiny-feeling space, I painted a sky in the blink of an eye. Wide gestures all around me in every direction, with the colour and brush menus ever present and within easy reach. I wanted to be in a giant open hall with no boundary, it didn’t seem fair to have that constraint in the face of such an instant freedom. I guess it might feel like parachuting while harnessed somehow to a cliff-edge instead of being able to be swept out into the wind over the vista below.
For years I’ve had this fantasy, of clearing out a warehouse (okay I happen to have one in mind but it’s full to the roof of several generations of family hoarding – long story), and lining the walls with wide canvases. A few haphazardly scattered around the room as well, like tricks set-ups in a horse show, with a circuit of momentum-gathering pathways. All around the room, gallon cans of paint, or maybe large trays in rows for colour-palettes, and buckets of large brushes would be at my disposal. And me, I’d be on rollerblades, tearing around the room, savagely attacking those canvases, slashing paint by the force of my movement rather than calculation. Or maybe it’s the speed of the rollerblades, knowing that it would force me from falling into the traps of the details, always on the forest and never the trees. Or not till later.
This felt the closest I’ve ever been to that fantasy. And yet I was still so far; the boundary lines, the googles pressing into my face and straining my eyes, forced to stay in place, against my better impulse to run, stretch my body, leap as my arm waves coloured light through the air like the magical wand I took with me everywhere as a child (and broke so many times, and had it ‘repaired’ so many times, that it was eventually the length of a marker). And while I feel almost guilty complaining about the graphics in the Rift, I missed the real world right then. When I described this warehouse fantasy and got the part about painting ‘the trees’, as in the details, later, the image that came to mind was of me at night, working by candlelight, lost in my own world. It made me sad, because I’ve never yet been able to get to that world in VR.
I thought of Wesley as I painted, imagining she must have cleared out her whole living room, and I hoped her work was affording her an ample stage in LA. I can’t imagine her painting the way she does in a confined space. As I shrunk myself back down to meet my squirrels again, and took in the landscape I’d just splashed across the now endless-seeming horizon, I had a moment of awe. It was for Wesley, the creator of this. Inigo Quilez may have created this app, which Allsbrook aptly named – in his name. But she, the artist, designed it. Thank you, Wesley.

What once was fantasy, was all I’ve ever known.
– Bahamas

Wow. Pretty overwhelmed over here. So after writing this last bit, I wanted to go back in, just to try and have that feeling, of mucking around in the warehouse. I had no idea what I had in store.
I discovered that Quill is endless. I watched a video not too long ago, where a camera followed a character through worlds upon worlds in Quill, and though I had considered that it was possibly all done in a single document, I eventually concluded that it must have been done in post. Nope. That’s all Quill. I let myself paint freely, becoming that kid in front of Mouse Paint again, and my world became alive (it did help that I’d managed to increase the boundary threshold somewhat). I painted to what I thought (according to my previous attempt, above) was the limits, encircling myself in a pale blue sphere of sky. But an accidental wrong-way zoom led me to discover that I could shrink this atmosphere into a tiny sphere the size of my pinky fingernail. It almost freaked me out a bit- but I’m getting accustomed to this terrain gifted to me by the endlessness of reality, or lack of.
I painted a bigger world around that one, and another around that. And I let my strokes go wild, painting to with Bahamas, dancing around the room. It’s as though the thesis has been a struggle to get to this moment, and the dimmer was the breakthrough. Wesley’s world is starting to unlock the door to my own. I alternated between free strokes and attempts to emulate her technique. How she builds shape and colour is so perplexing, but I have a flimsy confidence after today that though I don’t know how yet, I’ll find my way.
Immediately all care went out the window – in terms of rendering something ‘impressive’ – it’s not important right now. What matters is figuring out how to skate in this rink that goes in all directions and is so unbelievably disorienting and wonderful. I watched this Youtube clip last night that I hadn’t known about – a short interview with Wesley where she talks about what it’s like, being a VR artist. She makes a flat statement about how reality is hard, and this is her way of escaping it, where she would rather be. It sat with me, I chewed it over. At first I felt sad for her, for thinking of reality as too harsh a place to want to be in, but that thought got turned over several times. I see myself in the sadness where she has found freedom, and a sense of where I went wrong. I know, as I’m sure she does, that there is so much beauty in reality, but that of course is what makes the rest of it so unbearable by contrast. My attempt since adolescence to try and stay with the good while defiantly withstanding the worst of it, has led to a necessary numbing. I think that might be what killed the art, or stifled it for so long. It wasn’t just the pressure I put on it, though that didn’t help. It’s that I wasn’t escaping into it. And without being able to do that, I couldn’t find myself in it any longer. Not like I could as a kid, or in the few moments I’ve managed to wrest out of the wall of numbness over the years.
I found more than that warehouse in there. There’s galaxies to escape to. It’s a lot to take in. There’s a lot to learn. The learning is going to mean a lot of play.