I’ve often remarked that I’m sort of a weird person to be an architecture student considering my writing skills are probably a hundred times better than my art skills.  I never learned to paint, I can hand sketch only well enough to get a really easy point across (aka not good a pictionary), and forget fine art level drawing.  I survive using tools to help me get my ideas across, whether it’s a ruler or CAD, both of which help me eschew hand drawing on a regular basis.  Now there is a tool to help me paint, using that medium a excel: words. Or, at any rate, typing.

Tyree Callahan designed a Chromatic Typewriter for the 2012 West Collects competition.  Gizmodo reports that Callahan “replaced the characters on the ends of the typebars with small pads of oil paint, while the letters on the keyboard were swapped out with color swatches indicating what hue would be laid down with each key press, including shift options. While the hardware is decidedly old-school, the paintings are created in a fairly modern fashion, with each key producing a rectangular pixel of color.”  Using a tool like this a person who can type, and has a sense of how they want something to look, could paint without having to master actually making strokes correctly.  However, it would require an impressive amount of foresight to paint using a method like this, because I imagine creating color gradation is harder when your essentially going pixel by pixel in rows.  Sort of a throwback to Windows Paint programs (which I did love as a child), except fixing things would be more difficult. Maybe I’ll stick with Adobe Illustrator for now. [Tyree Callahan via Make via Gizmodo]