Corel Painter Brush Basics

Originally Published December 2010

In last week’s post, we began an exploration of the Brush Creator. Before we go any further, I thought it might be a good idea to review the basic brush controls. Please refer to the illustration above as we go. I’ll try to make this more than just a repeat of the user manual, and include some useful hints and pointers along the way.

There are two control panels you’ll use as you paint: the Brush Selector Bar (the little one) and the Property Bar (the big one). The Property Bar contains some of the same controls you’ll find in the Brush Creator. It’s sort of a little shortcut menu of the most-commonly-changed settings. Depending on the brush type, the Grain control (g) may not be present. Let’s start on the left, and move across. First, there’s a little brush icon. This “resets” the brush currently active (Captured Bristle, in this case). This has the same effect as “restore default variant,” which we saw last week by clicking on the triangle (o) in the Brush Selector. Doing either will result in the brush being set back to it’s original settings. So if you’ve changed all the settings on the Property Bar and you want to put it back the way it used to be, click on the brush icon button. No need to worry about “breaking” a brush: you can always set it back with one click.

The next three icons control the type of brush stroke. Usually, you’ll leave it set on the default (b), freehand stroke, which allows you to move the brush in any direction. The second icon (c) allows you to draw nothing but straight lines, by clicking and connecting points. Helpful tip number one: In default (b) mode, you can constrain the brush to create straight lines by holding down the shift key before drawing. The third icon (d) is used for aligning with a path, and it’s one I haven’t used ever. You’ll use it if you’re a vector kind of person, I guess. A sample stroke is shown for the freehand and the straight line stroke types.

The remaining controls on the Property bar (e through j) are the ones you’ll adjust most often.

• Size (e) controls the size of the brush tip. You can click on it to get a drop-down slider, which is a bit slow and cumbersome. A better way is helpful tip number two: increase and decrease the size with the [ and ] keys. On the Intuos 4 graphics tablet, I’ve programmed the Touch Ring to these keys, so I can adjust size easily without interrupting my work flow.
  
  
• Opacity (f) controls the density of paint being applied. For smooth transitions, such as in facial skintones, use a low opacity setting (20% or less). Helpful tip number three: you can change the Opacity setting in ten percent increments by typing a number (1 gives you 10%, 2 gives you 20%, etc.).
  
  
• Grain(g) is a setting that you’ll see here for certain brushes where graininess is a factor, such as chalk and pastel. Grain does not work consistently for brushes in Painter. Sometimes you need to set it to a low value to get grain to show up, other times a high value works instead. My advice is, if you’re using a brush with the Grain setting and the brush doesn’t seem to want to paint, try sliding the Grain to the other end of the slider. If that works, slowly back it off until you get the amount of graininess you’re after.
  
  
• Resat (h) is short for resaturation, which is similar to Flow in Photoshop. Think of a real-world brush. Loading it up with pigment is like having the Resat set to a high value. Using the brush with no pigment is like Resat set to zero. Which leads us to helpful tip number four: You can turn most any brush into a blender by setting Resat to 0. A common way I use this is to apply paint with a relatively high Resat value (40 or 50), and then I’ll turn it to 0 to do some blending. This is just like the “real world,” where you wipe your brush on a rag to get the paint out, for blending work.
  
  
• Bleed controls how much the brush interacts with the underlying colors, including the paper color. In my own experience, this control is very subtle, so give it some time and experiment. It does work.
  
  
• Jitter causes the brush to jump around randomly. A little bit of Jitter can give you a nice soft line. Again, play with it, see how it works, and see what works for you.

So that’s it for the big Property Bar. There’s not a whole lot to the Brush Selector, but it’s important to know the parts and what they’re called. First, there’s the brush icon (k), which is different for each category. The second icon (l) represents the variant. In this case the category is Acrylics and the variant is Captured Bristle. This is stated again in words (m and n). Lastly comes the triangle (o), which we took a brief look at last week. Click on this to get a fly-out menu of brush-related stuff. We’ll get to that another time.

Which leaves us with just one more helpful tip: these two bars, and most of the other palettes in Painter, have a little area in the very left (to the left of (a)), with a little clear circle inside it. Click on the circle to dismiss the bar. Click and drag elsewhere in that little area, and you can move the bar anywhere you’d like. Next week, we’ll get back to creating custom brushes. Thanks for reading!