Expresii

Next-gen paint program currently specialized in Eastern ink painting. It features important breakthroughs in recent history of digital painting technology: 1. 3D brushes allowing expressive strokes as if done wielding a real brush. 2. Truly natural ink (watercolor) flows giving you the charm of water-based media. 3. Vector-like 32k output with raster richness.

The development traces back to 1999 when Computer Graphics researcher Nelson Chu started to devise a novel method to simulate a brush in 3D. By wielding such a virtual brush, you can make vastly different marks which normally require switching between many ‘brushes’ in other programs. By eliminating explicit switching you can finally make expressive marks that capture your rhythm.

“There’s just something so liberating about doing an improvised sketch on Expresii” - Twitter user @ZerbinoCompany (2021)

Water-based media have always been a challenge in digital painting technology. Many paint programs offer ‘watercolor brushes’, most of which are based on local diffusion or stamping scanned images. Nice results can be achieved but something important is missing - the fluidity. Our paint simulation, on the other hand, brings digital watercolor to a whole new level by using Computational Fluid Dynamics for natural flows. The use of GPU makes such a simulation fast enough for real-time interaction, even on a tablet computer like the Surface Pro 8.

Finally, the simulation is paired with a new rendering method that gives you both raster richness and vector-like output up to 32k resolution. You can even import an existing illustration and have our ‘vexel rendering’ enlarge it up to 40x. You can export your artwork with alpha channel to your favorite image editor for further processing.

Please note that Expresii requires a good GPU to run smoothly. Not every system does have the right hardware so please try before you buy. If you encounter issue, please contact us at [email protected] before giving a bad review. We will try out best to help troubleshoot with you. Sometimes it’s really the GPU hardware or the driver behaving incorrectly, not our app. We have over a dozen systems spanning different hardware and OS combinations of Windows 7, 8, 10, and nvidia, AMD or Intel GPU, and Expresii works fine on all of them. Some of you may say your other paint programs don’t have issue on your systems - but please note that Expresii uses OpenGL and many other programs don’t. It is possible to encounter issue when you enable GPU support even in some big-brand creative suites.

To PC store keepers: use this Store Demo version instead of this version of Expresii to show off your x64-based devices: https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9PJT4RKQF6V0
The Demo version auto-load a sample artwork and give you easy access to toggle “Fast Mode” so that 1. you run Expresii smoothly even on a low-end GPU, 2. you can show how a better GPU boosts the experience.