Wednesday, June 18th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Black Ink: customisable, GPU-based digital painting


Black Ink’s new selection tools in action. The latest update to Bleank’s ultra-customisable, GPU-based digital painting tool brings its workflow closer to one familiar from applications like Photoshop.

Bleank has updated Black Ink, adding standard ellipse and rectangular selection tools to the digital paint app.

The new functionality brings the workflow of the innovative GPU-based package, which is still officially in beta, closer to one familiar from applications like Photoshop.

Black Ink: a recap
Available publicly for the past couple of years, Black Ink’s unique selling point is its Controllers: a node-based system for customising brush parameters minutely.

It also has a GPU-based rendering engine, making for smooth performance on large images.

If you aren’t familiar with Black Ink, Bleank’s video from Siggraph 2013 (below), gives a flavour of its capabilities.


Highlights of Bleank’s demo sessions for Black Ink at Siggraph 2013.

A more standard Photoshop-like workflow
The latest update (version 0.168.1749, if you want to be specific), couples that with ellipse and rectangular selection tools, complete with the usual Boolean-type operations and keyboard shortcuts.

The new tools bring Black Ink closer to a workflow familiar with from applications like Photoshop. We can’t find a complete feature list on the Bleank site, but you can get some idea of progress from the changelog.

Updated 20 June: Bleank has been in touch to say that it has added a list of current features to its forum. Upcoming features can be found in a separate post.

Pricing and availability
Black Ink is available now for Windows and Mac OS X. The full version costs $44.99/€44.99, or there is a save-disabled trial version for Windows only. The software is also currently available at a discount via Steam.

Read more about Black Ink on Bleank’s website

Read a full list of new features in the latest update