Painting with Bob: assisted creativity for novices

Abstract

Current digital painting tools are primarily targeted at professionals and are often overwhelmingly complex for use by novices. At the same time, simpler tools may not invoke the user creatively, or are limited to plain styles that lack visual sophistication. There are many people who are not art professionals, yet would like to partake in digital creative expression. Challenges and rewards for novices differ greatly from those for professionals. In this paper, we leverage existing works in Creativity and Creativity Support Tools (CST) to formulate design goals specifically for digital art creation tools for novices. We implemented these goals within a digital painting system, called Painting with Bob. We evaluate the efficacy of the design and our prototype with a user study, and we find that users are highly satisfied with the user experience, as well as the paintings created with our system.