Digital technologies can conduct an important role in preserving intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Nonetheless, existing work tends to be limited to digital storage, presentation, dissemination, and education, with comparatively little concentrating on production and reproduction of the craft, the key to revitalizing ICH. In this paper, we explore digital making as an approach for both the inheritance and innovation of ICH handicrafts. Taking Hairy Monkey craftsmanship as an instance, we conducted a workshop with 15 groups of makers, teaching them the traditional Hairy Monkey craft and subsequently enabling them to create innovative works with digital technologies in their own time. As revealed by our interviews with these participants, ICH brings cultural inspiration to digital making, and digital making rejuvenates ICH through innovative art forms and its positive influence on participants. As demonstrated in this paper, digital technologies can be deeply integrated with ICH through making to revitalize ICH from the core through living transmission.

InkBrush is a new sketch-based 3D drawing tool for creating 3D ink paintings using free-form 3D ink strokes. It offers a digital calligraphy brush and various editing tools to generate realistic ink-like brush strokes with attributes like hairy edges, ink drips, and scattered dots. Users can adjust parameters such as moisture, color, darkness, dryness, and stroke style to customize the appearance of the brush strokes. The development of InkBrush was guided by a design study involving artists and designers. It was developed as a plugin for Blender, a popular 3D modeling tool, and its effectiveness and usability were evaluated through a user study involving 75 participants. Preliminary feedback from the participants was overwhelmingly positive, indicating that InkBrush was intuitive and easy to use. Following this, we also sought in-depth assessments from experts in ink painting and 3D design. Their evaluations further demonstrated the effectiveness of InkBrush.

Shadow puppetry, a culturally rich storytelling art, faces challenges transitioning to the digital realm. Creators in the early design phase struggle with crafting intricate patterns, textures, and basic animations while adhering to stylistic conventions - hindering creativity, especially for novices. This paper presents Lumina, a tool to facilitate the early Chinese shadow puppet design stage. Lumina provides contour templates, animations, scene editing tools, and machine-generated traditional puppet patterns. These features liberate creators from tedious tasks, allowing focus on the creative process. Developed based on a formative study with puppet creators, the web-based Lumina enables wide dissemination. An evaluation with 18 participants demonstrated Lumina’s effectiveness and ease of use, with participants successfully creating designs spanning traditional themes to contemporary and science-fiction concepts.