User Guide

Customizing Brushes 197
Customizing Brushes
The Brush Creator makes it fun and easy to create brush variants in Corel Painter. This
chapter provides descriptions and procedures for building, customizing, and saving the
many parameters of any brush type using the Brush Creator.
Some of the brush settings in the Brush Creator can also be found in the Brush Control
palettes (available from the Window menu). The palettes match the categories on the
Stroke Designer page of the Brush Creator. The Brush Control palettes are ideal for
making small adjustments to a brush variant while you work. However, if you’re
unfamiliar with the settings, and want to preview and adjust a brush variant before
you apply strokes to the canvas, the Brush Creator is a better choice.
You can adjust the Corel Painter brushes in many different ways. In fact, the default
variants in the libraries on the Brush Selector bar are built with the same set of controls
used to build every other variant. They’ve just been adjusted until the results emulate a
real-life drawing tool.
Although these default brushes do excellent work, you’ll probably want to adapt them
to your particular needs, refining them to fit your own style of working. You can
change their size, shape, angle, flow, and much more.
Changes you make to brush variants, including basic controls like Size and Opacity, are
saved until the Restore Default Variant command is selected. Corel Painter also allows
you to save custom brushes as the default, as new variants, or as looks.
When Corel Painter starts, it references a folder (called “Brushes”) in the user
folder. Any customizations made to brushes are saved to this folder and are
referenced by Corel Painter in place of the original default brushes and
settings stored in the application folder. When a user resets a brush variant,
Corel Painter removes only the related files from the user folder.