Pure ink (a painting software in Chinese Ink Art)

Pure ink is a painting freeware wholly developed from the concepts of Chinese ink art, and takes the role of a junction to digitize this traditional Asian culture for multimedia arts and industrial design in the 21st century. The software is unique in the ways of simulating realistic ink diffusion effects in REAL TIME and brushwork in Asian ink painting and these are not commonly achieved by other commercial software nowadays. This software is open to the public for free access in order to promote digital ink art and its education. It is the ONLY freeware in the market for digital Chinese ink creation with clear targets on ink art modernization and education. Pure ink has been invited twice by the Hong Kong Art Development Council in 2022 to hold workshops for art ambassadors from secondary schools. Pure ink won Merit Award of DFA Design for Asia Award 2022 presented by Hong Kong Design Centre and Certificate of Merits in Interaction Design of the Hong Kong ICT Award (香港資訊及通訊科技獎). For a long time all painting software dominated in the market was designed based on the concept of Western painting, including the brush types and the coloring approaches used. Asian ink style is hardly expressed through such software and thus hardly applied in commercial design. Pure ink is designed to address this issue to visualize the beauty of ink diffusion and brushwork on rice paper (Xuan paper). Unlike the other graphical software, Pure ink adopts advanced technology to simulate the diffusion of ink and water-based pigment in real time to create subtle ink effects on two different typed of paper (paper of Yunlong 雲龍紙 and Xuan 宣紙). Besides, it also simulates the various strokes of Chinese brush, from vertical brush (中鋒) to inclined brush (側鋒) and broken brush (散鋒), from wet paint (濕染) to dry stroke (乾擦). The software is capable of outputting works in high resolution for the purposes of exhibition and product design. Examples that we did include printing the works in 100cm x 30cm on Chinese paper for art exhibition, and designing graphics in ink style for clothes and tableware. Pure ink runs on desktop and laptop, with both Windows and Mac versions. It is not for tablets or mobile devices. The software can be downloaded from https://pureink.org/download.html