Flame is an online painting program, but it’s very different to other online tools available such as Aviary. It’s part of an experimental project called “I am artist” created by Peter Blaškovi? of Escape Motions. Below you can see a screengrab of the entire user interface.
The tool lets you pick a black or white background and then change color palettes for your foreground paint brushes. When you use a black background, the palette is additive, when using a white background the palette is subtractive. For web designers, I could see Flame as a really useful for creating unusual backgrounds, headers and footers for websites or to use as a layer in Photoshop (or any other image editor). Apart from that, it is really good fun to use and the effects are very impressive.
The main tool is the brush with which you paint. You can change the color, saturation and opacity. You can also change the focus of the brush and alter parameters such as chaos and noise. There is a helpful eraser tool, and you can also choose to clear the entire artboard. Working with this tool is a very nice experience.
When you want to save your work of art to your computer, press save. Your picture is not saved onto the Flame website. Your artwork will open in a new window, and then it’s up to you to right click and save the picture to your computer. You can save high resolution pictures of 1680 x 1050 pixels.
Here are a couple of paintings which were saved in the Flame gallery showcasing some work which is far superior to my pathetic effort at the top of this post.
Have you seen Flame before? Did you use the artwork you created with it in a web design or digital artwork?
Jennifer FarleyJennifer Farley is a designer, illustrator and design instructor based in Ireland. She writes about design and illustration on her blog at Laughing Lion Design.
