User Guide

154 Corel Painter User Guide
brush stroke appear blurry, because the dab is significantly bigger than the pattern.
Scaling the pattern up to 100% makes the dab as clear as it can get. Settings higher
than 100% have no effect on the appearance of the brush stroke.
You can picture this process by imagining that the current pattern is 100 pixels across
and the current brush size is 50 pixels across. With the pattern set to 100%,
Corel Painter shrinks 100 pixels into a 50-pixel area, which it can easily do without
visible loss of accuracy. If you scale the pattern up to 200%, it looks as clear as the
original, so that fitting it into the 50-pixel brush size creates a brush stroke that looks
the same as when the pattern was scaled at 100%. If you scale the pattern to 50%, the
original will be the same size as the brush, so there is still 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 first being scaled down, the image
becomes blurry. This is especially noticeable if you scale the pattern well below brush
size. At 20%, the pattern now consists of only 20 pixels and has lost 80% of the
original data. When Corel Painter expands that to 50 pixels (the brush stroke size), the
loss of data becomes very visible. Lower settings in scale result in even blurrier brush
strokes. If you scale down to 2%, 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
the image 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 > Library Palettes
> Show Gradients.
If the Gradients palette is not expanded, click the palette arrow.
2 On the Gradients palette, choose a gradient from the Gradient Selector.
In the center of the palette, the Gradient Preview Window shows the selected
gradient.
3 Click one of the following Gradient Order buttons:
• Left to Right Gradient
• Mirrored Right to Left Gradient
• Double Left to Right Gradient
• Right to Left Gradient