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ARTRAGEUS E-Magazine Copyrights Reserved Feb 2010

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Letter from the Editorby Bobby Ray Howle

Hello all of you Ragers! Welcome to the first issue of our newE-Magazine. I have to say that it has been somewhat of a

challenge to produce this E-Magazine from scratch,however, we have succeeded. The Rages that have

participated are to be commended for their efforts andtime involved.

We hope that all of you join

and add your stories and art in future issues.ARTRAGEus belongs to you. BY you and for you.

What is this e-Magazine all about? It's all about you. Artistsusing the best paint program available on the market.

We each have the opportunity to see our art publishedwithin the magazine each month. This affords us all the

incentive we may need to move to toward a more professional

level if we so desire. It also allows us to share ideas andtechniques from from others. All of the users of ArtRage can

make their own pages for the E-Magazine.

Our first issue is a test to get the E-Magazine in a mode

of production. Most of the pages are in a JPEG format which

was necessary at the time for the first issue as it was goingto be posted on Spotbit.com . However, their web site has

disappeared from the web for some reason.

All future issues will be in PDF format. This will afford us

a higher quality E-Magazine and available participation byall of the Ragers. We recommend a free PDF writer program

called OpenOffice, if you do not have one.

Please be aware that in this month's issue, the links will not

function nor can they be copied as they are on a JPEGimage. The new format PDF will be a much more

professional E-Magazine. ARTRAGEus isn't it?

A big thanks to the ArtRage Creators at Ambient Design for theirassistance and dedication to the users of their product

and helping to make this E-Magazine a reality.

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ARTRAGEus Interview with Matt Fox-Wilson / MattRageby Eileen724

Its quite obvious that all of us in the ArtRage Forum simply love using the wonderful paintingprogram, ArtRage - hence, all of the beautiful and creative artworks that are posted here aswell as the constant bragging about ArtRage! But many of us and especially anyone new toArtRage or anyone that is interested in using ArtRage, know nothing about who the individuals

are that are behind ArtRage and how it all got started.

The following are the questions I asked the guys from Ambient Design and MattRage was kindenough to take the time out of his very busy day to answer for us. Thanks Matt!

Who are all the individuals behind Ambient De sign and what kind of experience dothey bring to the table?

The core of the company has four people involved - three in New Zealand and one in the U.S.A.Here in New Zealand, we have myself, Andy Bearsley, and David Jenner.

Andy and I write all the code. Andy writes the backbone of the application (the painting tooltechnology, the way we interact with the operating system, undo, text support, etc.). I do theinterface design and write the code that makes the design work in the application.

David handles all of our tech support and also does Quality Assurance/Bug Hunting for us. Hesits down and breaks what we write so that we can rewrite it and make it more stable.In the U.S.A., we have Uwe Maurer who handles all of our business development. He'sresponsible for interfacing between us and partners such as Wacom who bundle us with someof their tablets. He's also adept at finding channels to help get the product out there to morepeople.

Externally, we have worked with Mike who wrote our networking code (the stuff that lets uscheck for updates) and Athena who provided the fantastic new tool icons, cursors, andapplication icons. Athena also put together a number of sticker sheets and is working on someupcoming stuff for us as well. She's a whiz with pixels!

Who is this mysterious cat named Tyco (you know - that cute little cat that pops upon occasion between the layers on the Layers Pod)?

Tycho is my cat. He lives in the office here and spends most of his time shedding on the carpet.

He was originally just included as an Easter egg but he gained rapid popularity and he evenhas his own email address now. He even gets fan-mail from time to time.

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Where is the Ambient Design's office located and how many people are actually on staff there?

We have one main office and one satellite, both in Auckland, New Zealand. The main office is hidingaway in a forest and has two people and the satellite has one person. We operate from home ratherthan having a distinct office. It's more comfortable and we find it promotes a creative approach towhat we do.

Does Ambient Designs have any other products - if so, what are they?

While we have worked on other products in the past, ArtRage is the only product we have done forourselves. We previously worked on Photoshop Filters, video software, networking applications andall sorts of stuff of varying interest, but ArtRage is the only product we wrote for ourselves and selldirectly.

When and how did ArtRage start from a c onception to what it is now (whose brainstorm was itand how did it all come about?

Ambient was originally a contracting company doing work on other people's products and westarted to get fed up with that. There are only so many times you can be told to justify design ortechnology decisions to a committee before you give up and do it your own way! We worked on anumber of fun products that didn't have those kind of restrictions but we always wanted to be ableto step aside and do our own thing.

ArtRage really started fermenting in the mid nineties. We'd written a 3D Painting product which wasaimed squarely at people with professional 3D needs and expensive computers. But, it introduced usto the problems of digital paint and how it never really made sense to users of real painting tools.

Lots of our contract work involved trying to make system more accessible. So we started to lookagain at how we might take those principles as well as our general skill set in computer graphics

and turn it into a product.

ArtRage itself was born some time in the early 2000's (I remember a car trip when Andy and Idiscussed potential ideas for it) and it turned into a commercial product when we won the 2004Microsoft 'Does Your App Think In Ink'competition with ArtRage 1.

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What has been your primary goals for ArtRage and do you see any of those changing along theway?

We spent ArtRage 1 finding our feet for ArtRage 2 and then spent time learning from ArtRage 2as we worked on Studio/Pro. So our goals have been driven by what we discovered about creatingand selling an entire product rather than just working on bits of a product. With Studio, our goal hasbeen to fill in some of the gaps in 2.0 without losing the overall simplicity of use and, most

important, the invitation to be creative.

ArtRage was always about just getting in there and creating something. We wanted it to get out ofthe way of the user and present natural tools that just worked, to let people get on with paintingrather than having to sit down and learn how some digital system wants you to approach its tools.

Over time, I think our goals have become clearer and easier to achieve. Since we've been able totake advantage of lessons learned from previous versions, we've had more time to work on thereally important stuff.

In your opinion, what makes ArtRage so uniquely different from all of the other painting

programs that are out there?

It's hard to say, really. I think the biggest difference is how we try not to sacrifice the natural feel fordigital precision. The canvas in ArtRage is a great example. It sits there constantly under thepainting because it's an integral part of the piece. Real canvas isn't flat white and most otherpackages, even if they recognize a canvas texture when their tools work, don't show that canvaswithout using special filters or settings. In ArtRage, you have a piece of material to paint on andit's shown there from the outset.

The paint tools follow the same sort of system. There are loads of potential dials and levers thatcould be added to the oil paint, for example. But instead of putting in all that complex tweaking,we chose to give some natural settings and avoid exposing the bits and pieces that just aren't

needed. There's nothing worse than a system that tells you you can get a realistic brush if youjust know how to adjust these 20 parameters". This means that people who are used to absolutelyprecise tweaking and paint work may have a problem adapting. But the upside is that we present abrush that just works and has that natural chaotic feel that I believe you can lose if you spend toolong focusing on the pixels.

If you zoom in to your painting in ArtRage, we don't just make the pixels bigger, we smooth them asbest we can because we're not about showing you how many little squares you have slapped ontothe canvas.

I think we sit alongside other packages quite well. I have never told anyone they should be usingArtRage to the exclusion of all other products because I don't think there are any other products outthere that have the same approach. Since we're not trying to replace any other product, we're free todo things our own way and I think that's what makes us so different.

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How are you able to put so much time and effort into the development of ArtRage yet onlycharge such a minimal fee unlike the others who charge hundreds for their software?

Part of it relates to the size of the company. We don't have anywhere near as many overheads toworry about as some of the larger companies out there. Another part of it relates to the targetmarket. ArtRage has lots of features for pro users but the larger part of the potential market for 'arton a computer' (as opposed to Digital Art, which I feel has a slightly different focus) is surely in the

non-professional users who just want to play around with paint and learn about art, produce theirown pieces, and show their work to others without having to invest huge amounts of money.

To support that market, we make sure that we maintain a low cost version so that it's accessible toall. I can't say for sure how it all works, but it does, and I'm happy with that!

How much work went into ArtRage 3.0 compared to prior releases? In order to help othersunderstand the development process of new releases for ArtRage, explain to us what is allinvolved (for the most part) and where in your development phase is most of the timededicated?

The Studio/Studio Pro version took us about two and a half years of development time. There wereasides during that time to handle updates to AR2.5 and builds for specific partners but most of itwas development.

Much of the early time was spent doing research on new ideas and systems, such as the Text systemand Stickers. That's the skeleton stage, when you start to hook bits and pieces together to form aframework for the new product. During that period, we were using a modified version of the ArtRage2 interface because I was working on the new designs.

About a year before release, we really started working on the final version and getting some meat onthe bones we had constructed previously. That's when we started to look at the work we had done

and work out what needed to be interacted with by users, which functions to show and which tomanage internally, that kind of thing.

The interface happens alongside all this and as it happens, it wasn't until partly into 2009 that weactually had a model that would be used for the final version. There were a few other ideas exploredbefore I went with the model you see in there today.

The last six months was spent with fixing bugs in the early code and making sure that the featuresreally worked for users. There were a number of major changes made to how we did things when wesaw how the alpha and beta groups had been working with the product. That final stage is aboutpolishing the raw material you've put into the product and making it shine. We took about twice aslong over this release as we had over previous ones.

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What future development plans do you have for ArtRage?

Now that we're finishing off another update release, we're starting to look at some of the featuresthat didn't make the 3.0 cut. We have some plans coming together but there's nothing solid enoughto reveal at this point.

The sticker and filter systems provide some interesting possibilities for side-projects along the way

and we have plans sketched up for our community systems as well but we don't have schedules setright now. We're still recovering from the release in a way. We had the most hectic month we've everhad and we're just starting to take a breather now!

What does it mean to you to having such a strong and devoted ArtRage user community in theArtRage Forum?

It has been absolutely fantastic watching the community grow. We originally implemented the forumexpecting a few users who might give a bit of feedback about the product and share images but itrapidly became obvious that there was something more going on there.

I think that our focus on 'every man painting' has led to a community that doesn't have quite sonarrow a field of interest as some digital art forums and the result has been astonishing to watch.It's always nice to know that you have created something people enjoy using - the sheer volume ofincredible work that fills the forums, the marvelous personalities and the warm welcomes you seethere all the time have been a huge encouragement for us working on the product.

It's part of the product's appeal too, I think. We see people commenting on ArtRage but noting theforums as they do so, the two are fairly well integrated in the minds of onlookers.

Do you have any plans in the near future on updating the ArtRage Forum no w that AR3 is outand are you opened to any feedback from the forum members on what they would like to see?

We're looking into this at the moment, specifically in relation to how it interacts with the memberarea, how we can support other languages, and how we can expand to provide support for specificuser communities such as education. We've wanted to do this for some time but work on Studio/Protook all of our resources.

We're always happy for feedback, too. It really helps to know what people are looking for.

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How surprised are you at the ever increasing popularity of ArtRage and how much of it do youthink is mostly by word of mouth from existing ArtRage users?

No new release has ever failed to surprise us with its popularity. We tend to be cautiously optimisticabout things but each time we put something out there. The response has been way better thanexpected. The response to the Studio/Pro launch was overwhelming and to see people waiting onthe forums for the release to happen on launch day was fantastic (it also made it all the harder when

we had to postpone to the following day to let the member area upgrades get tested!).

How can others help with the ArtRage "evangelism"?

I'd say a lot of the success of the product has to relate to word of mouth and general productevangelism. We don't do that much advertising currently and I believe most of the larger marketswe're touching are ones that we couldn't really advertise to anyway.

So much of its success must be due to people liking it enough to tell their friends. I'd say that's thebest way to be though. To be able to see a product spread because it 's well liked and gives peoplewhat they want is really rewarding.

For more information on the company and the wonderful people behind it, please visit:http://www.artrage.com/company.html

The ArtRage Team

Matt Fox-Wilson / MattRage

Creative Director

Andy Bearsley / AndyRage Technical Director

Dave Jenner / DaveRageQA Engineer

Mike Van Bokhoven / MikeRage Application Engineer

TychoVicious House Cat

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Reflections

By TonyJazz

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A place to play

By TonyJazz

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Lost Forest

By TonyJazz

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Night landscape

By TonyJazz

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CAPT PHIL HARRIS

By TonyJazz

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