Messy Media™ is a new graphics application that fully captures and communicates the actions of the artist. Previously, paint systems gave visual results by little more than mapping the position of the strokes from the artists hand, and visually embellishing them using rendered effects to add a richness to the final result. Spontaneity within work was rarely present.

The driving concept behind Messy Media™ is not specifically to render 'realistic' textures or representations of existing media, which many systems already succeed at to greater or lesser degrees. It is to allow the expressions of the artist at the instant of creation to completely show through in the image. Any system that otherwise compromises the artist will become a passive rendering experience, and will yield results that will reflect precisely that... they appear stilted and overworked.

These are artefacts of nearly all computer derived illustrations, since the full intent and composure of the artist at the instant of the expression is lost during transcription. The system produces a result that fails to reflect the full articulation of the artist as it is not designed to measure the full space of interaction. Furthermore, it is not engineered to react to artistic interplay with the necessary degree of accident to allow an ongoing dialogue between interactions to take place.

In physical media, the image builds in a completely different way, because the artist can respond to the accidents as they take place in real-time. It can be seen as the visual equivalent of the difference between live and pre-programmed music.