Brush it off
One of the best features of Corel Painter is the fact that you aren’t limited by the hundreds of different brushes that come with the program. At first, that might seem like a strange statement; “what, hundreds of brushes aren’t enough for you?” Well frankly, no. There is no substitute for creating a brush that gives you the “look” that you had pre-envisioned when you started your piece. Fortunately painter has some tools that make this process much easier and cooler as well. While you can go through the controls of a single brush and adjust its many properties like the shape of the brush, how it applies “paint”, and how much “jitter” it has, this can become tedious and harder to get the particular result you are after. Instead, painter has two tools that really help; the first of which is the “randomizer”. This takes the controls of the brush and randomly gives you different options to try. This process is how I came up with my sculpting chalk. I randomized one of the existing chalk brushes, and then played with a few sliders afterwards and it became exactly what I was looking for. The second way is even wilder, and that is by using the transposer. This takes two different brushes, and combines the best properties of both and puts it into one brush. So you could do something cool like combine a chalk brush with watercolor, and get a totally unique look.
Besides the brushes I’ve made for myself, I have also relied on brushes supplied by other users in the painter community. One of the all time favorites is the set of “Den’s Brushes” created by Denise Laurent. In the set is my personal favorite, the “Funky Chunky”. It is an integral part of my landscape paintings. There were also brushes included in the Painter Creativity book by Jeremy Sutton that were created by some of his students that attended his classes. One of my favorites from this set is Paulo’s Goodbrush, which is another brush I have used a lot. John Derry is one of the “founding fathers” of painter, and he has released a set of watercolor brushes for purchase that give more realistic results than what comes with the program. Stay tuned for some images that I’ve painted using these brushes. They take a little getting used to, but I am now creating paintings that I actually want to share with you.
So if you are new to the program, it would be worth your time and effort to explore the many different brushes that are available out there. That way you will have the tools to express your inner muse.