User Guide

Painting112
Painting with Gradients
and Patterns
With the Corel Painter computed
brushes, you can brush on gradients,
which are gradual transformations of
one color into another. Refer to “Using
Gradients” on page 93 for more
information. The Corel Painter
computed brushes can also brush on
patterns (repeating designs). Refer to
“Using Patterns” on page 66 for more
information.
When you paint with a pattern, you
can adjust the pattern’s scale. Scale
affects a pattern brush stroke in a
special way—it determines the
resolution of the painted patterns.
Small scale causes blurry computed
brush strokes. Large scale causes
sharper strokes. Here’s why:
The brush stroke is always drawn as
the entire pattern, sized to fit in the
current dab size. Scaling the pattern
down very small (say to 20%), makes
the brush stroke appear blurry,
because the dab is significantly bigger
than the pattern. Scale the pattern up
to 100% and the dab is as clear as it
can get. Settings over 100% have no
effect on the appearance of the brush
stroke.
Here’s how to picture what’s going
on:
Imagine that the current pattern is 100
pixels across and the current brush
size is fifty pixels across. With the
pattern set to 100%, Corel Painter
shrinks 100 pixels into a 50 pixel area,
which is easy for it to do without
visible loss of accuracy. If you scale the
pattern up to 200%, it looks just as
clear as the original, and fitting it into
the 50-pixel brush size creates a brush
stroke that looks the same as when the
pattern was scaled at 100%. Scale the
pattern to 50% and the original will be
the same size as the brush, so still
there is no difference in the resulting
brush stroke.
Now, keep scaling downward. As the
size of the pattern is scaled below the
size of the brush, Corel Painter must
increase the size of the pattern to fit
the 50 pixel area of the brush stroke.
When images are scaled up, after
being first scaled down, the image
becomes blurry. This is especially
noticeable if you scale the pattern well
below brush size. At 20%, the pattern
now only consists of 20 pixels and has
lost eighty percent of the original data.
When Corel Painter expands that to
50 pixels (the brush stroke size), the
loss of data becomes very visible.
Smaller scale settings result in even
blurrier brush strokes. Go down to
2%, and the pattern is only 2 pixels
across and is able to contain, at most,
four colors (two across and two
down). When Corel Painter expands
that to fit the brush stroke, you won’t
see any of the original pattern, just a
fairly uniform color, across the dab.
To paint with a gradient:
1 Select a brush that applies media
to a document.
If the Gradients palette is not
displayed, choose Window menu
> Show Gradients.
If the Gradients palette is not
expanded, click the palette arrow.