How to make a drip painting on the computer

Making a drip painting on a computer takes one free program, Easel by Zaweba, a painting studio for Windows. Lay paint down with the drip and flick tool or the pour tool, turn the tilt dial so wet paint runs downhill, then press Dry now (Ctrl+D) to lock the runs where you want them. Repeat in layers until the picture is done.

The method below walks through each stage, from choosing a surface to exporting the finished picture.

Before you open the tilt dial

Easel itself, a mouse or a pen tablet, and a little patience. The program paints on your graphics card using WebGL2, and a mid-range card handles even an A3 sheet at 300 DPI smoothly. A basic built-in chip works too; the paint just moves a bit more slowly. Everything happens offline and nothing needs an account.

Laying and tilting the paint

Start a new picture. You can choose an A size, a square or custom millimetres at 72 to 300 DPI, portrait or landscape. For a first attempt a modest size at a lower DPI keeps things quick.

Next choose a surface. Easel has 37, and each changes how paint behaves. Canvas or a primed panel gives the paint something to sit on; rough watercolour paper soaks it in and shows granulation. Pick one that suits the look you have in mind.

Now pick your paint and tool. Drip and flick throws paint at the surface, while the pour tool lays down a stream, optionally with silicone cells. Pouring acrylic is the paint designed for pours. If you would rather start from a ready setup, the Pollock drips preset is one of the 28 built in.

Put some paint down, then turn the tilt dial. The dial sets both the angle and the direction. The angle grows with the square of the distance from the centre, so small movements near the middle give gentle slopes that are easy to control. Wet paint begins to run downhill in proportion to how wet and thin it is.

Watch the runs. When one reaches the length you want, press Dry now. Dry paint never moves again, so you can add more paint over it and tilt a different way without disturbing what is already there. Ctrl+0 lays the canvas flat again whenever you need it.

Making the runs behave

Thin paint travels and thick paint stays put. Watercolour pools at the lower edge and breaks into drips, thinned acrylic and heavy spray drip, and thick oil barely moves. If nothing is running, the paint is probably too thick or already dry. Wet paints such as gouache, acrylic and oil have Water and Thickness settings, so raise the water and lower the thickness for longer trails.

Time matters too. Watercolour dries in about 20 to 30 seconds and oil in about 10 minutes of real time. The drying speed slider runs from 0.25 to 4 times, so slow it down if you want more time to steer the runs, or speed it up when you want to move on.

Vary the direction between layers. Drips that all fall the same way look like a wet window; a second layer tilted at an angle crosses the first and gives depth. Because colours mix like pigment, two wet colours that run together make a believable blend, while drips over dried paint stay clean.

Use undo freely. Easel keeps 80 steps by default, and undo covers tilt runs and drying, so a run that goes too far can be taken back.

From drips to a finished file

Save the picture as a .zeasel file if you want to carry on later; wet paint stays wet in the file. When it is done, export to PNG, JPEG or TIFF at 1x or 2x. If you have used thick paint, you can export with or without the impasto lighting.

Drip paintings make good time-lapses, since a lot happens while your hands are off the controls. Easel records frames after each stroke and while paint is moving, and exports them as a WebM video, a web page or a screensaver.

Other ways to do it

A normal image editor can fake drips with a smudge tool or a drip brush, and that is fine for a quick graphic. The difference in Easel is that the drips are made by the paint itself running under gravity, so their shape comes from how much paint you used and how steep the tilt was. For a painting rather than an effect, that is the part worth having.