Black-and-white drawing support for adobe illustrator using onomatopoeia

Abstract

Adobe Illustrator provides many tools for a user to create art works. The tools also provide many parameters or options that the user can tune up or select. This study focuses on black-and-white drawings (“Sumi-e” or “Suiboku-ga” in Japanese) on Adobe Illustrator. In order to create black-and-white drawings, the user usually has to select a proper brush from preset brushes Adobe Illustrator provides. But the selection is difficult for the user, especially beginners. This paper proposes a supporting plug-in tool for the user to decide and apply the proper brush. The plug-in can accept an onomatopoeic utterance input which expresses the user's own imagination or impression of the brush. Onomatopoeia is well known as a useful figurative expression for Japanese people to describe their own imagination or impression for something. This paper reports the configuration of the plug-in and illustrated some examples of black-and-white drawings created by using the plug-in. The architecture of the plug-in consists of CNN(convolution neural network), database of brush samples, brush image interpolation, fuzzy-based image expansion and contraction, and so on. CNN allows input of arbitrary onomatopoeias. The brush image interpolation generates a new brush from brush samples in the database. The fuzzy-based image expansion and contraction transforms the new brush into a natural-looked brush form with less jaggy.