User Guide

Painting100
Categories” on page 100 for more
information.
• which brush variant is selected
within the brush category. Refer to
“Selecting a Brush” on page 103
for more information about
selecting a specific brush variant.
• controls such as brush size,
opacity, and how much color
penetrates paper texture. Refer to
“Brush Settings” on page 104 for
more information.
• the current paper texture. Refer to
“Choosing Paper Textures” on
page 63 for more information
about selecting paper.
• the color, gradient, or pattern you
select to use as media. Refer to
“Painting with Color” on page 108
and “Painting with Gradients and
Patterns” on page 112 for more
information about choosing media
to apply.
• the brush method. Refer to
“Methods and Subcategories” on
page 152.
Understanding Brushes
The Brush tool represents a wide
variety of tools you can use to mark on
your document, including oils,
sponges, pencils, and chalk. Brush
strokes are created when you use the
tools to drag on the canvas.
On the Brush selector bar, pre-built
brushes (brush variants) are arranged
into recognizable categories. Corel
Painter brushes are built to emulate
Natural-Media tools. This lets you
select a tool with a reasonable
expectation of how it will behave. In
an art store, if the tools in one aisle
don’t produce the results you want,
you can try a different aisle. Similarly,
with Corel Painter, you can try
different brush categories to find the
tool you want.
You can use the pre-built Corel
Painter brushes as they are, or you can
adjust them to suit your purposes.
Many artists use Corel Painter brush
variants with only minor
adjustments—to size, opacity, or grain
(how much color penetrates paper
texture). If you want to make more
extensive modifications to a brush or
create a totally new brush variant,
there are controls for doing just that.
Refer to “Customizing Brushes” on
page 143 for more about using the
Brush Creator to customize brushes,
and to “Saving Brush Variants” on
page 183 for how to save modified
brushes as custom variants.
Most Corel Painter brushes apply
media (a color, gradient, or pattern) to
an image. Some brushes, however, do
not apply media. Instead, they make
changes to pixels already in the image.
For example, the Just Add Water
brush smudges and dilutes existing
colors in the image with smooth, anti-
aliased strokes. Using one of these
brushes on a blank area of the canvas
has no effect.
Brush Categories
On the Brush selector bar, you can
choose from a list of brush categories.
Brush categories are designed with
real media in mind, so you can select a
tool with an expectation of how it will
behave.