Has anyone come across Alchemy before?

It's a great program for sketching and creating random abstract shapes. Of its many features I really like that it can save progress shots to a pdf at specified intervals (5 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute etc). Best of all, it's open source (of course!) and the pdf it creates is editable in Inkscape as vector shapes! Here's two of my pieces





One problem I've found is that when importing these images into inkscape it can slow it down quite a lot. The first image probably has about 1500 shapes in it. I've asked the developers for a way to impose a limit on the amount of shapes you can have in a drawing but so far no response. If anyone can code in java I'm sure you'd be a great help to many people!

I am using Alchemy and it is a really unique application. It is just useful to draw chaotic shapes and try to find a pattern, an idea in these shapes. If you wonder what I mean, check out this video:

http://vimeo.com/6143607

David Revoy uses Alchemy, MyPaint (it is a great painting application) and Gimp to paint a project. It is amazing. A perfect use of Alchemy, and other programs.

http://durian.blender.org/news/tutorial ... vid-revoy/

Ufuk_k wrote:http://durian.blender.org/news/tutorial-painting-time-lapse-by-david-revoy/

Funnily enough that's where I found out about Alchemy. I think Inkscape could do with a few features from that program, such as mirroring (which may be in 0.47) and some more randomisation tools.

Wow, Alchemy sounds like something I might really enjoy. But according to its website

"Alchemy is currently in a very raw ‘Alpha’ release stage, as we work towards a full public release."

I'm really not good with even beta releases, so I'm wondering what your experience has been with crashes, glitches, error messages, etc.? Compared to Inkscape, how stable would you estimate?

Thanks for any comments

I'm running an ASUS F5SL laptop with Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and it runs pretty well. Please bear in mind that I've only been using it for just over a week so haven't been able to really test it thoroughly. However, from doing a sketch in it probably every day so far there's been absolutely no crashes.

I have it set up to save a snapshot of my drawing to a pdf every 30 seconds, so after about 10 minutes the program halts for a second whilst it's writing but otherwise I'd say it's pretty stable for what it is. Using this method even if it does crash you have previous snapshots saved to a file.

As I mentioned in my first message you may experience problems bringing it into Inkscape as your drawing may be made up of 1000s of shapes which would slow Inkscape down and also the way Alchemy creates gradients is by applying a mask to a shape, not by filling a shape with a gradient (annoying).

Compared to Inkscape it's a good at what it does. I would like to see Inkscape adopt some of its features but at the same time I think Alchemy could never replace Inkscape as it's a program just for sketching. Once I learn more java and write a module to reduce the shape count of a sketch I know that I'll just be using Alchemy to do a sketch and then use Inkscape's powerful editing tools to make it better.

My best advice: try it for yourself!