Software - exclusively for art: my "digital brushes"

The hallmark of my digital artistry lies in the deliberate avoidance of traditional software with predefined functionalities. Instead, I craft my art pieces using self-developed graphic programs (my "digital brushes"), dedicated solely to bringing my unique ideas and visions to life.

As I am neither a computer scientist nor a software developer, the programming is very pragmatic and purely results-oriented. The choice of programming language is also rather random. I use Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition within the Visual Studio development environment, which is based on the Microsoft .NET framework.

Although Visual Basic 2008 is no longer up-to-date, it is free, well documented and completely sufficient for my artistic purposes. In addition, I only use a few commands for the Windows GDI+ graphics interface such as DrawLine, DrawEllipse / FillEllipse and FillPolygon, as well as simple Get and Set operations at pixel level. All functions for the 3D representations such as perspective, occlusion, movement, light and shadow are developed by myself on the basis of these simple graphic commands.

These are my developed programs:

Grafik06

the central graphics program for creating and displaying
3-dimensional objects (the "virtuographies") with backgrounds, light and shadows,

Pixel04

for pixel-level image editing
(manipulation, RGB values, image mixing, filters, structures),

Raster

for image decomposition/rasterization
and image synthesis/mosaic image creation,

Verlauf01

for the generation of structureless to plastic color compositions (generatives) by using mathematical algorithms in an extended RGB color space,

KGen02

for digital image synthesis based on irregular and matrix-oriented image divisions ("mosaic images 2.0"), in many aspects a successor program to "raster".

Wechselbild02

for pixel-precise adjustment of two images/photos
for creating print templates for producing alternating double images. Now with real-time 3D preview and fine adjustment for image detail, position and correction effect (eye focus, keystone correction).

Wortgen

for the creative generation of "art names"
for my digital works,

and many other assistance programs.

For color design, I have the RGB color space with 32 bits per pixel (3x 8 bits (red, green, blue) + 1x 8 bits (transparency channel alpha)) with over 16 million (exactly 16,777,216) different colors at my disposal.

With my standard size for the generated graphics of 15,000 x 10,000 pixels (= 150 million pixels), that is 0.6 billion bytes or 0.56 GB of main memory required per individual graphic. Fortunately, the graphics files are easy to compress and only take up a few MB on the hard drive in JPEG format.

For color and harmony management, use Harald Küppers' color wheel (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Küppers) in combination with Roman Liedl's theory of harmony (http://www.metacolor.de/winkelharmonie. htm).

Using the Küppers color wheel, the entire RGB color space can be completely represented with 1536 different combinations of two primary colors plus a gray value (R=G=B).

For a color identified in this way on the color wheel, harmoniously matching colors can be assigned according to Roman Liedl's angular harmony theory. Even if Liedl's color wheel does not correspond to Harald Küppers', I think his basic idea of color harmony is fundamentally transferable.

Such a color combination that is “outwardly neutral” (complementary contrast) is referred to by Liedl as angular harmony. He distinguishes between two-part harmony, three-part harmony, four-part harmony, etc.