One of the reasons why traditional artists    don't like digital painting is that digital artwork only exists in cyber space. They prefer something they can hold in their hands.  To address this, we can simply print the artwork on real pieces of paper.

A decade ago, printing on  Eastern art paper was not easy because  of the paper thinness  causing jams.   Nowadays, it is much easily given those designed-for-printer-use Xuan paper packs in size  A4 or A3 or even in rolls available from taobao.com  (sorry, site in Chinese).   There are also Japanese paper designed for printing too (like Awagami). Looking at their website, it seems their papers are thicker than the art  paper we normally use for Eastern art, and thus pigments won't soaking into the paper all the way through like in real calligraphy works.

十年前用宣紙打印很麻煩的，因為紙太薄送紙容易弄皺。但現在淘寶有專門用來打印的宣紙，A4、A3，甚至長卷均有出售，雖然還是會皺，但廢品率已經改善很多。日本也有為打印而設的和紙，還未試，但感覺如果紙太厚則沒通透感，會像普通打在紙表面的 印刷品，而非像真的書法作品那麼墨滲透紙纖維的 藝術品。

Here we use Xuan paper packs (really cheap at  <2USD a pack of 100 sheets) bought  from Taobao.  

For an authentic feel, we use Ink Jet printers instead of laser, because the paper absorbs the ink just like in real artworks. ​ If you use laser,  the pigment stays on top of the paper, giving an ordinary 'printout' feel. Here we use very low-cost printers with only 4 pigments. If you have more expensive printers using more pigments in different tones, the result should be finer.

See the process and more results:

Casual viewers probably won't notice those are prints.  This is especially true when  the work is   purely black like in normal Eastern calligraphy. 

For those who can't access Youtube, see if you can watch the same video hosted in this site:
如果您是大陸的，可能Youtube 看不到，所以我也試下在本站放上面那個視頻，看看您們看不看到，留言告訴我情況啊：

Veikk sent us  an S640 pen tablet for testing. We did some quick doodle and  calligraphy with the low-cost (currently $26 on Amazon ; $28 on Gearbest) pen tablet:

The S640 is light-weight and portable. It is the thinnest I've ever tried.  At first I wished the S640 comes with some shortcut buttons, but now paring it with a   bluetooth keyboard   I don't really need them on the tablet itself.

The S640 is very thin. See it for yourself:

I like the Huion H420 for being able to have its cable unplugged. But mine is not functioning after a year because of rusting metal  for the battery compartment. :(   The new Veikk S640  is battery-less so no worry for replacing battery and of course rusting metal is never an issue.  

Schools on a low budget should consider picking up such low-cost tablets for their digital art education. Digital calligraphy is big and we should further develop our tradition in the new era.

We were excited ever since the first Surface Book came out in 2015, since it gave the option for a discrete GPU.​ Now we have a chance to test with a Surface Book 2, thanks to Microsoft for providing the hardware for testing.

We are provided with the 13.5" model. Coming from the 12" Surface Pro, I like the bigger screen size.   The hardware feels really solid and clean. And of course, with an nvidia GTX 1050, we get very good performance, although it gets a bit hot and the fan would kick on. 

See the calligraphy process video in Youtube:

The recently released TabMate from Clip Studio  is a controller designed specifically for digital painting.  Long-time Expresii user Shuen Leung is very happy with the new controller. The following is a video walk-through for setting up the controller for use with Expresii:

The setup process is very similar to that of the Nintendo Joy-con. However, the TabMate gives constant left or up signals for the Left and Right Joysticks, so user would need to disable the Joystick readings or function assignment from inside Expresii.

Acknowledgement: we thanks Shuen Leung for lending us the controller and  providing feedback and suggestions using the TabMate. Let us know if you have any feedback in using similar controllers!  You can read more on the TabMate in this English review  by Scigor.

 Hong Kong-based artist Shuen Leung   tries out Microsoft Surface Studio and Surface Book 2:

Shuen does artwork in both traditional and digital media.  She specially likes Expresii for its ability to undo.   "Expresii 是可以undo 的 水墨!"     (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

Check out her website and Facebook page for  works, art tips and more.

We recently added  native support for Microsoft Surface Dial.   The combination of   pen, touch and wheel gives you a new way to interact with Expresii.

Two custom menu items,   Rotate & Brush , are added specific for Expresii: 

When Expresii's main window is in focus, a press-and-hold on the Dial takes you to the above radial menu.  When Brush is selected, you can press the Dial to invoke our own Brush Control Menu, which has  four items, namely Brush Size, Loading, Wetness and Scratchiness:

For instance, you can use the Dial to adjust Brush Wetness while you stroke:

All of these controls, except brush size, can be adjusted as you stroke.  Yes,  as you stroke, instead of between strokes. Things  happen in real time.   You can rotate the paper with the Dial as you paint. By adjusting your pen tilt angle at the same time, thanks to the tilt-sensitivity of the pen, you can create  interesting patterns!    

When you enable gravity  in Expresii, your rotation actually  directs the ink flow. Expresii's advanced paint engine  give the most natural simulation of brush and ink hands down. You won't believe what your Surface device can do!

And of course the Dial is also handy for undo and redo. See it in action for yourself:

We had a lot of fun playing with   Expresii   &   the dial.   We hope you do too! ​As always, stay creative!    └(°ᴥ°)┘​

Lunar new year day was  16th of Feb, 2018.   We wish you all the best for the new year  of the dog!

Now it's being a tradition we play with the Chinese character for the year.  This year, we play with the character 狗, which means dog:

Recently, ambigram  is popular around East Asia, so we make one that reads dog and shows a dog 90-deg turned.  

​And notice how we use pen tilt to make organic marks.

Chinese characters give you so much room for imagination!  We can't stop playing with them!
​大家快來寫數位書法，漢字給你太多想像了！

Only Expresii gives you this level of expression with brush and ink! 

Soon after the Nintendo Switch was released in March 2017, digital artists have been using the controllers, called Joycons, as a hand-held controller for digital painting.  In contrast with all previous low-cost single-hand game controllers we tried before, the joycons ($80 a pair ) are equipped with gyroscopes, accelerometers and even IR motion camera.   ​

The joycons works on Windows even without installing a driver  but the analog thumb-stick only works as digital buttons.  Thanks to  this   Joycon driver for Windows   by Matthew Fosse, we can now also use the analog joystick (and maybe later the gyroscope too).

After installing vJoy and Joycon driver as instructed by the Joycon driver page, we are able to use Joycon for quick controls for Expresii. We had to connect the Left joycon instead of having left and right combined, since the mapping of the combined controls is different from what Expresii currently accepts. We tried  x360ce  to remap the controls but  we didn't figure out how yet. :)   Currently, Joycon driver outputs gyroscope data as rotational impulses rather than tilt angles so we can't really make use of the gyroscope  for brush tilt yet.   Anyway, here is a short video of using Joycon with Expresii:

We thank Mandy Ng of   Rooftop Animation    for providing the Joycons. ​

We ended last year with SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 held in Macau.  Little did we know it was a great start of an amazing year ahead.   For Expresii, there are mainly two major themes  in 2017: 1. Animation. 2. Microsoft.

Soon after SIGGRAPH Asia,  Angela Wong  took Expresii for a spin and made some simple yet impressive animations like  the Red squirrel  and the  Swallows ​. I think the Red squirrel  now becomes a classic sample for modern ink animation. A Japanese anime studio has been using Expresii for background paintings for some TV series but now Expresii is used even for foreground animation!       o͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡╮(^ ਊ ^)╭o͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡​

   'Ink Animation' (or 'Brush Painting Animation' or 水墨動畫 in Chinese)  was a proud product of China from the 60's-80's but there  wasn't much new development since then.  There have been attempts to do ink animation  using existing fluid simulation in 3D CG software packages but they mostly created something that look like fume (e.g. this) instead of Eastern ink painting.  Another popular way was to map captured real brush strokes textures and map them onto 2D or 3D geometry - which could make the animation look like Chinese shadow play  where you see fixed textures shifting around. In 2017 summer,    Shanghai Animation Film Studio     (上海美影廠)   unveiled  a new title 《斑鹿飛渡》 and gave a talk on the their new development on ink animation. However, what they claimed to be breakthroughs (building a library of stroke forms and combining 2D with 3D) aren't really breakthroughs.  

Now with Expresii we hope to develop a truly modern way of doing ink animation.   We are still experimenting and will unveil what we come up with when ready. 

We started to get attention from Microsoft near the end of last year. Once we got in contact with the right personnel  things happened pretty quickly. In April we secretly flew to Redmond to meet with Microsoft technical folks and management including Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Devices, Panos Panay, who was impressed by our Expresii. ​​Our saying 'every stroke has its own personality' struck him. He specifically asked to have our app ported to their App Store and we did . Panos asked why don't they  hire this guy (i.e. our tech guru Nelson Chu). And he was told  that Nelson did join Microsoft several years back and he was actually a key contributor to   Project Gustav, which later became Fresh Paint   - which Panos himself still uses to show their hardware. ​Within our short trip,   we were filmed in Seattle for a Microsoft partner video (by Watts, see their page  for a longer version of the video):

All these were in preparation for the then-top-secret global launch of the New Surface Pro in May.  It's our honor that Panos decided to talk about Expresii on stage himself.  We were also invited to local launches in Hong Kong  and Taiwan.  Later Microsoft also features Expresii on their Surface Pen page  as well as their 'Apps for Windows Ink' collection.  

We are especially proud to be the only team from Asia to be featured in Microsoft's 2017   app partner collage video.  In fact, when we cut out the parts, we are surprised that Expresii bits  total 30 seconds, or 1/4 of the  2-min. collage's length!  And notice that the other app partners include giants like Adobe, Autodesk & Corel.   

In Expresii, not only are we able to develop advanced software technology that even giant competitors can't make, we are also promoting the good side of our culture through technology. Expresii is not a me-too app. We have our own visions and we try our best to implement them even given limited resources.

Expresii  is being developed as a painting app and we didn't expect it to be used more and more  in animation.   ​It was even  used in this 2017 TED-ed  Animation .  We may be a bit quiet lately but we are far from being lazy. We just can't wait to show you new stuffs when they are ready. We are really grateful to our partners and friends for making things happen. We  look forward to more industry   collaboration and new possibilities in 2018!           (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

This is mainly    for those from China only.  If you're from other parts of the world please just buy directly from Gumroad or Win10 Store.

好消息，现在Expresii已经开始支持微信支付，支付宝，银联等购买方式。想買的可以直接這個鏈接購買Expresii 的 Win32版，但先請確定你能用且用的開心才好買啊，因為退款比較麻煩  :P    謝謝支持！

進入Avangate 的畫面是這樣的，下面有可選 微信支付，支付宝，银联等的：

買完之後，會發給你一個License Key，之後也是要用‘防火牆模式’註冊的啊。
​
如果您的機器，有較好的GPU，跑Expresii 是通常都有100+FPS（在視窗頂的title bar 可以看到FPS），那就應該會用的挺爽的（intel 的 GPU現在比較多會出些error）。

其實不用註冊也可試用，只是不能存儲而已。如果您有用Win10，也可到 Windows 10 Store (应用商店) 试用（30天，能存儲）或购买Expresii 的Store 版。

p.s. 以後不用怕淘寶代購會刷黑卡了。