Studio roadmap · V2 and beyond

Direction, not a feature promise. Research must succeed, enough compute must exist, and the result must earn its place in the app.

The next canvasis being stretched.

Living Paintings begins with a complete idea: watch art take shape, paint your own by hand on iPhone or iPad, create privately from words and pictures, and live with it across Apple devices. This is the direction the studio intends to explore after that foundation is in people's hands.

V1 foundationReal app output
WhalersJ. M. W. Turner, c. 1845A real V1 performance—not a V2 concept render.

The foundation

V1 stands on its own.

The first release is not a waiting room for a better app. Its brush-built performances, private creation, living gallery, Paint it on iPhone and iPad, playlists, display modes, and Apple-device continuity are the product. Everything below is intended to add value around that complete foundation.

Explore the V1 experience
Watch
Replayable brush-built performances
Paint it
Hand painting on iPhone and iPad
Create
A prompt, a picture, or both
Collect
54 included works planned for launch
Live with art
iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV

Seven creative territories

Where the studiocould go next.

These territories are grouped by creative purpose, not a release order. The work moves from research to product only when it is beautiful, reliable, private, and ready for real devices.

Motion

Planned direction

Paintings that keep breathing.

Move beyond a single construction performance into subtle, persistent life—without losing the composition that made the image worth living with.

  • Low-frame-rate animation

    Deliberate, painterly motion with the cadence of moving illustration rather than ordinary video.

  • Living motifs

    Let water, foliage, skies, candlelight, fabric, and other chosen passages move while the painting stays itself.

  • Painterly video treatment

    A video-to-painting mode that transforms selected clips into temporally coherent painted motion instead of treating every frame as an unrelated filter.

  • Directed motion and loops

    Choose where movement belongs, protect quiet passages, and shape cadence and loop behavior without animating frame by frame.

Intelligence

GPU-intensive research

A model made for paint.

V1 combines local image generation with an inspectable deterministic painter. The longer-term ambition is a model trained around painting structure and living performance from the beginning.

  • A purpose-built painting model

    Move beyond the V1 diffusion-to-painter handoff toward a full model designed for painted construction, materials, and time.

  • A stronger deterministic painter

    Improve stroke placement, edges, surfaces, stage logic, and material character while keeping the result replayable and inspectable.

  • Better picture + prompt control

    Give people more faithful control over what stays, what changes, and how their words guide the chosen picture.

  • Selective editing and extension

    Dedicated inpaint, outpaint, and named-object tools for changing or extending one chosen part while preserving the rest.

  • Multi-reference continuity

    Combine more than one visual reference and carry subjects, palette, setting, or character identity across related works.

Story & sound

Longer-horizon exploration

Paintings with a voice and score.

The same visual language can become a gentler form of storytelling—made for families, rooms, and imaginations rather than another feed.

  • Narrated living stories

    Animated painterly stories for children and families, with narration designed as part of the experience.

  • Picture-book direction

    Arrange scenes, characters, words, voices, and transitions into a complete story rather than a disconnected set of clips.

  • Built-in MIDI accompaniment

    On-device musical parts that can follow the pace and structure of a painting as it unfolds.

  • Scores that follow the painting

    Let tempo, dynamics, instrumentation, and silence respond to the actual construction and motion of a work.

Curation

Product exploration

From a painting to an exhibition.

Collectors, families, educators, and curators should be able to shape how a body of living work is encountered—not merely choose what plays next.

  • Exhibition builder

    Sequence works with pacing, transitions, music, wall text, and a clear curatorial idea that travels with the presentation.

  • Rooms in concert

    Coordinate different paintings across multiple displays while every work keeps its own composition, aspect ratio, and rhythm.

  • Guided and self-guided modes

    Offer concise labels, deeper curator notes, family interpretation, and classroom-ready paths without covering the art in interface chrome.

  • Scheduled galleries

    Let a room change by time, mood, collection, or occasion while remaining calm enough to live with every day.

Access

Design requirement

More ways into the work.

A sophisticated art experience should not require one age, one body, one language, or one appetite for motion.

  • Captions and audio description

    Describe narration, sound, visible action, and artistic context so the experience remains legible without relying on one sense.

  • Motion on the viewer’s terms

    Extend reduced-motion support with calmer loops, adjustable intensity, static holds, and complete still alternatives.

  • Multilingual stories and context

    Carry narration, labels, and learning material into more languages while keeping names, credits, and source history precise.

  • Designed for touch, remote, keyboard, and voice

    Make the same collection genuinely navigable from a child’s iPad, a curator’s Mac, a television remote, or assistive technology.

Integration

Developer ecosystem

Make waiting part of the artwork.

Living Paintings could become a portable visual medium that developers and studios can bring into their own products—not only an experience inside ours.

  • Progress-synced loading art

    Map a painting’s construction to real loading progress—including pauses and resumes—so the final stroke can land when the app is ready.

  • Portable stroke packages

    Export the compact painting program with its timing, aspect ratio, final still, credits, and provenance instead of flattening it into a video.

  • Public format and playback kits

    Explore a documented public codec and lightweight playback libraries for multiple languages and platforms, so teams can integrate the same living artwork reliably.

  • Graceful fallbacks

    Include static, reduced-motion, interruption, and failure states so custom loading experiences remain accessible and never hold an app hostage.

Platforms

Conditional expansion

Beyond one ecosystem.

Apple devices are the first home for Living Paintings, not necessarily the final boundary. A new edition would move forward only if it can preserve the same craft, privacy, and reliability.

  • Mac drawing-tablet studio

    Explore bringing Paint it to Mac with pressure-sensitive drawing tablets and precise pointer controls, once the desktop interaction can feel as natural and trustworthy as painting on iPad.

  • Windows desktop

    Explore a full Windows edition for collecting, creating, playing, and presenting Living Paintings—not a reduced companion viewer.

  • Omarchy-first Linux

    Explore a native-feeling Linux desktop edition beginning with Omarchy, with packaging and playback designed to belong in that environment.

  • Android

    Investigate an Android edition across phones, tablets, and displays without quietly lowering the experience for a wider range of hardware.

  • One portable painting format

    Keep the compact stroke program, credits, and deterministic playback contract consistent across platforms so a painting remains the same work everywhere.

The studio standard

New is not enough.It still has to belong here.

These are the promises the roadmap must protect even as the technology changes. A feature that breaks them is not progress.

The painting remains itself

Motion, sound, and intelligence must serve the composition rather than replace it with spectacle.

Private and local by default

Personal pictures, prompts, projects, and generation should stay on the devices people choose whenever practical.

Editable work belongs to its maker

Projects should be portable, recoverable, and useful without trapping a person inside a required subscription or cloud account.

Rights and credits travel with the art

Sources, artists, music, narration, transformations, and sharing permissions remain clear wherever a work goes.

Access begins in the prototype

VoiceOver, captions, readable type, remote and keyboard control, still alternatives, and reduced motion are design inputs—not cleanup.

Every device earns its experience

Features should fit the screen, controls, memory, graphics hardware, and setting of each device rather than chase superficial parity.

What sets the pace

More imagination needsmore silicon.

GPU capacity is the biggest practical constraint on the most ambitious parts of this roadmap—especially training a purpose-built painting model and testing better generation at the scale required to trust it.

Revenue from V1 is intended to be reinvested into local GPU hardware, model training, engineering, and device qualification. That can accelerate the work without turning the core app into a cloud dependency.

Compute
More experiments, larger training runs, better comparisons
Craft
Turn promising research into an experience worth using
Proof
Qualify privacy, speed, memory, and quality on real devices

How an idea earns its place

Wonder first.Proof before release.

The roadmap is not a queue of promises. It is a path for turning ambitious ideas into trustworthy parts of the app.

  1. Explore

    Build the smallest honest local experiment.

  2. Compare

    Test it against a simpler alternative and the unaltered work.

  3. Craft

    Turn a promising result into an experience people understand.

  4. Qualify

    Prove quality, privacy, rights, access, speed, and reliability.

  5. Release

    Ship only after it survives real devices and human review.

Direction, not deadline

No dates painted over uncertainty.

This roadmap is a statement of intent, not a delivery schedule. Research changes what is possible. Priorities, names, scope, and availability can change, and some ideas may not ship.

Buying V1 is for the app available at the time of purchase—not a preorder or guarantee of any particular future feature. The roadmap exists so people can see the larger creative ambition without confusing that ambition with what V1 already offers.

Living Paintings · Edition 01

Begin with the art.Stay for what it can become.

Return to Living PaintingsSee the V1 Studio plan