Buy a copy of Digital Painting Fundamentals with Corel Painter 12

Get Real
Have you tried the Real 6B Soft Pencil yet? Look once again at the strokes in the bottom row of Figure 1.13. Marks made with the Wacom pen held upright are thin lines, but as you tilt your pen the lines become wider. It’s possible to make a very wide stroke if you change your grip so that the pen is at a steep angle. This imitates sketching and shading with the side of a pencil or pigment stick. For a photo of this grip see Figure 3.3 in Chapter 3, “Have Another Layer,” where you’ll use this technique in an illustration project.

Traditional paintbrushes can have a variety of shapes and are composed of numerous bristles that can range in length, thickness, and stiffness. The kind of mark made by a bristle brush depends on a large number of factors: quality and number of bristles, viscosity and amount of paint loaded, and the pressure and direction of the artist’s stroke. There are several Painter categories devoted to bristle-type brushes. They include Acrylics, Oils, and Impasto (Italian for thick paint). Take a couple of variants from each of those categories for a test drive. As you did with the Acrylics Wet Brush earlier, notice how strokes interact with each other. The following variants made the dabs and strokes shown in Figure 1.15.

Acrylic: Clumpy Brush
Oils: Fine Camel
Impasto: Smeary Bristle Spray

The green and pink dabs made with the Acrylic Clumpy Brush are squeezed ovals, like plump grains of rice. There is a slight variation in the size and brightness of bristles. Short strokes have ragged edges at the beginning and end. Longer strokes fade out gradually, losing color but continuing to show bristle striations.

The footprint of Fine Camel Oils looks like a spray of tiny bristles. Use a light touch for a smooth opaque stroke. Increased pressure makes the bristles spread out, showing spaces between them. It’s hard to see the delicate dab of Smeary Bristle Spray from the Impasto category. Like the Fine Camel Oil, strokes show spaces between bristles. But this brush, as its name suggests, picks up underlying color and smears it. The impasto effect can be turned off in the Navigator settings shown in Figure 1.16.

So Many Choices!
Every new version of Painter introduces one or more exciting new categories, and Painter 12 unveils Real Watercolor and Real Wet Oil. To keep the sheer number of categories under control, some of them have been combined. For example, Pastels and Oil Pastels are now grouped together in Pastels. Several other categories and variants have been reshuffled. Painter 11 users will get used to the new system quickly, but there is also the option of loading the “legacy” Painter 11 brushes. The pop-up menu in the Brush Selector offers the choice of Brush Library.

Any way you slice and dice the categories, there are nearly a thousand variants to choose from! Just exploring a fraction of them and keeping track of the ones you like can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are ways to organize brushes and quickly find the ones you need for a project.