Alchemy: Order from Chaos

It seems rare these days that something comes along and shakes you up as an artist, and presents brand new horizens that were formally out of reach. That's how I feel about Alchemy, an open source 'sketching' program designed by Andrew Jones of Massive Black. His whole motto for this application is 'order from chaos' - what you paint with is essentially random shapes, and, in the case of my first hastily scrawled image, it was using random vector typographics, warped beyond recognition.

This is a liberating tool. To give you an idea of its measure the programme has no undo. That's right - you don't need one here. Not in a place where there is no wrong. And besides, it's the 'chaos' that truely makes an image feel uncalculated, somewhat elemental and unfathomable. Andrew Jones has created an application that can inspire you, and works along the same lines as cloud gazing - the mind sees shapes in random forms, and often in ways that the logical mind struggles to reproduce.

I highly recommend this tool, and I think it's a revolution for digital artists!