Is there a digital Jackson Pollock drip painting program?

The program you want is Easel by Zaweba, a free natural-media painting studio for Windows, includes a Pollock drips preset among its 28 built-in presets, along with drip and flick, a pour tool and pouring acrylic. The paint is simulated as a liquid, so when you tilt the canvas the wet paint runs downhill instead of sitting where it landed. It works offline and needs no account.

Jackson Pollock is the American painter best known for laying canvas on the floor and dripping, pouring and flinging paint across it. The look depends on wet paint behaving like wet paint: trails that thin out, pools that spread, lines that break into separate drops. Most drawing programs can imitate the marks with a scatter brush, but the marks are frozen the instant they appear. Easel takes a different route, and that is the reason it suits this kind of picture.

Why simulated liquid matters for drip work

Easel treats paint on the surface as a fluid. How much liquid moves from one spot to the next depends on how much is there, the gravity coming from the tilt, how thick the paint is and the surface tension at dry edges. A wash holds back until the bead at its edge is deep enough, then weak spots break out into separate drips. That is the behaviour that makes a poured line look poured.

Thickness changes everything. Watercolour runs and pools at the lower edge, thinned acrylic and heavy spray drip, thick oil barely moves and dry paint never moves at all. So a Pollock style picture in Easel is a matter of choosing paint that is wet and thin enough to travel, then deciding how far you want it to go.

Where to begin

The quickest way in is the Pollock drips preset. A preset sets up the tool and paint for a particular look, so choosing it gives you a starting point that already behaves the right way. From there you can switch between drip and flick, the pour tool and pouring acrylic as the picture builds. Your own presets can be saved too, so once you find a mix of settings you like you can return to it.

The surface makes a real difference. Easel has 37 surfaces, each with its own tooth, absorbency, colour and texture. Primed canvas, raw cotton duck, wood panel, hardboard and concrete are all on the list. Paint soaks into some and sits on top of others, and the grain shows through thin passages.

Working in layers of time

Pollock built his paintings in passes, letting some paint set before adding more. Easel lets you do the same thing with drying. Watercolour dries in about 20 to 30 seconds of real time and oil in about 10 minutes, and a drying speed slider runs from a quarter of the normal speed to four times faster. When you want a set of drips fixed before you add the next colour, Dry now locks the wet paint in place so the tilt can no longer move it, and dried paint never mixes again.

That gives you a rhythm: throw a layer, tilt to let it run, dry it, then throw the next. Because colours mix the way pigments do, two wet colours that meet will blend into a believable mix, while a colour laid over dried paint stays separate and crisp.

Keeping the happy accidents

Drip painting is full of moments you could not repeat on purpose. Undo in Easel keeps 80 steps by default and includes tilt runs and drying, so you can step back from a run that went too far without losing the strokes before it. A saved .zeasel file keeps wet paint wet, along with the palette and masks, so you can stop halfway through a pour and pick it up another day.

Easel also records a frame after every stroke and while paint is moving. A drip picture is especially good to watch back, and the time-lapse can be exported as a WebM video, a web page, or a Windows screensaver through Screensavers by Zaweba.

What it will not do

Easel is a painting studio, not a physics laboratory, and it does not claim to recreate any particular Pollock canvas. It gives you the materials and the gravity, and the composition is yours. A decent graphics card helps, since the paint runs on the GPU; on a basic built-in chip wet paint simply moves a little slower rather than letting your strokes lag.

If you want to try drip painting without buying a roll of canvas and a garage full of enamel, it is a good place to start, and every failed experiment costs nothing but a click of undo.