User Guide

Academic Courseware:
Joyce Ryan
iv
who had written this wonderful software. I had ideas for tools I wanted
them to make especially for animators. My next stop was the Time Arts
offices in Santa Rosa, California, where I first met, among many talented
artists, programmers and engineers, John Derry, who was destined to
become one of the co-creators of Painter. The people I met were
pursuing a goal—to replicate natural media with a computer. I fell in
love with their work, made some of the best friends of my life, and
eventually joined the company in an 8-year relationship, first as a
software reseller, then eventually as an animation consultant, software
trainer, demo artist and interface designer. I wanted to take what I knew
about conventional animation techniques and apply it to the computer.
It has been my passion ever since.
Jump ahead again and it is now 2004 and I am teaching Digital Ink and
Paint at the Art Institute of Atlanta. I am demonstrating Corel®
Painter™ to my class. I ask my students how many of them remember
seeing the scene in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” where the
children are shown lickable wallpaper. Willy Wonka excitedly tells them
to lick the wallpaper, that the strawberries taste like strawberries, the
pineapple tastes like pineapple, and the snozzberries taste like
snozzberries—but the children had never heard of or tasted
“snozzberries.” The snozzberries had to be magic. I then showed my
students the watercolor brushes in Painter that acted like watercolor, the
chalk that acted like chalk, and then the brushes that acted like nothing
they had ever seen before. The Image Hose that painted with donuts.
The brush that painted with metal. And how it could all be used to
make animation. For that moment we were all as excited as children
tasting “snozzberries” for the first time. The fruit not from a bush or a
tree, but from an inventor’s imagination!
I wish to thank my husband John for contributing so much of his
artwork and support while I was writing these chapters. I want to thank
my son Lucas for his comments and insight. I want to thank my
students at the Art Institute of Atlanta for letting me test my tutorials
on them. I want especially to thank all the good people at Corel who
supported this book and who continue to develop Painter, pushing the
envelope of what it can do. They just keep making it better—it must be
magic.
Joyce N. Ryan, 2004