So I'm obsessed with technique over substance. I hardly ever use the same style twice before I scrap everything and develop a totally new workflow: One painting as a proof of concept, two for mastery and to prove that it's either too slow or too ugly to suit my needs. That's why I've been painting for 16 years now and only have, like, 20 pictures to show for it

And so, having tried virtually every art program ever and still not being satisfied, I had no choice but to learn how to code to continue my search for the Ultimate Shortcut. Thought I'd share some of the tools I've been working on here to provide context for the work I'm posting.

Orthobox (video)

I draw with Adobe Illustrator, and since 2D vector art and 3D NURBS geometry are analogous, I became obsessed with the idea of generating 3D models from orthogonal drawings. I've got scripts to do this in MoI and Rhino. To produce these sheets, I've developed an Illustrator plugin that preserves the proportions of linked shapes across orthogonal views (Demo video, timelapse drawing)

BrushVSSL (video)

A 3D brush for Adobe Illustrator that renders models as raster objects. All Wacom functions supported (Pressure, tilt, bearing, rotation, wheel). Load as many simultaneous .OBJs and matcap textures as you can fit into memory and spray away.

I've made a bunch of other brush-like tools, including an airbrush for coloring vector objects (paths, gradient meshes) and a 3D path cloning brush.

Normal painting (video)

My favorite: A special mode for the airbrush tool that interprets pen tilt as vectors so I can paint faux normal maps onto gradient meshes and render them with 3D materials.

Some other toys and dead-end experiments:

Extrusion (Speedpaint)

Tool for texture mapping gradient meshes

One-point perspective (Speedpaint) (Deprecated but still cool I think)

Radial array (Deprecated but cool)

And the big one:

GeoVSSL (video)

I've spent the past year implementing a full 3D vector graphics renderer on the Illustrator artboard, based on Phoria.js. So far I've implemented 3D mouse support, a transform gizmo, component dragging, a clone brush, rudimentary curve drawing and extrusion.

I've reached a point where it needs a total rewrite for it to actually be useful, so I'm procrastinating by returning to art. I'd like to use it as the basis for a 3D vector graphics game engine somewhere down the line. Long term, I'd like to implement OBJ importing and render NURBS geo directly to gradient mesh. Long long term, maybe you'll see some more direct modeling features, or at least compound path extrusion, which is gonna be a huge headache. And if I do make a game engine out of it, I'm going to need some animation tools too.

Alright that's all I've got. I know I'm apparently the only Illustrator user on earth, but I worked hard on this stuff and needed to document it somewhere. If you scrolled this far, THANKS FOR LOOKING