VEXER is a graphics editing tool unlike any you’ve ever used. Far from being the product of a carefully thought out plan, VEXER has come into being through a bizarre process of evolution directed by the utterly broken-down brain of Kelbv. Whilst he will almost certainly spend the later years of his life wandering through city streets shouting at squirrels, for now he has been writing and releasing regular updates to VEXER.
[ Photos 1, 2, 3 credit to Kelbv. Photo 4 credit to hua bing chong ji ]
The idea behind VEXER, if there is one, is that you draw some stuff and VEXER draws some stuff and you can fiddle with what you draw and what the computer draws. What you’re able to draw is pretty limited: think MS Paint’s airbrush, but anti-aliased and with less features and a few very peculiar tools. You can paint additively, subtractively, with a square or a circle and you can choose the size. When you fancy it, you can tell VEXER to paint some stuff too. It’ll draw shapes for you, join lines and try not to ruin what you’ve just drawn by sticking to areas of black or white. You can also set some funny options like painting in 3D so that what you draw will appear three dimensional when you’re wearing red-blue glasses. Essentially, the whole process of drawing in VEXER feels quite out of control; you’re never quite sure if telling the computer to draw something is going to utterly ruin your hard worked-on picture. Even so, you get used to that feeling and, in the end, you decide it doesn’t really matter. It’s all part of VEXING.
Because VEXER is so limited (and incredibly complex) in what you can do, the challenge in playing with it is to create fun, silly, or aesthetic drawings whilst remaining simple. If you set out too ambitiously, you will almost certainly be saddened by the result. The range of pictures people have churned out of VEXER has astonished me, mostly because everything I’ve done with it isn’t fit to see the light of day!
Vexer is up to version 30 31 now, and you can download it (Windows .exe) at Kelbv’s Vexer page. There’s a Flickr group with a few people playing around with the program and posting their results and fun new features are added as they happen upon Kelbv to insert them. Keep an eye on the updates and get VEXING!
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