Thread: Corel Painter 11

As the name suggests, Corel Painter is an application that allows users to create digital paintings that will resemble real-world art. Unlike an image-editing tool such as Adobe Photos hOp, this application has very few filters because most of the work is expected to come about manually. With Corel Painter, the only stationery one needs is a drawing tablet, such as one made by Wacom. Consider it as a pre-requisite especially if you're a true artist and if you want to digitize your thoughts and imagination with maximum details.

While Corel Painter is mainly intended for veterans from the ar~, design and most importantly from the painting industries. Even aspiring artists can learn a lot from it. Considering the enormous amount of features, matte-painting artists are likely to grab this application in the blink of an eye. Considering that there are no recurring costs involved such as physical brushes, paints, canvases and such, one can go all out with artistic experiments.

The most striking point of Corel Painter 11 is the number and types of hard and natural media brushes that it features. For instance, painters use different types of physical chalks, markers, pencils and crayons on various surfaces - all these can be mimicked in this application with true-to-life details. Also each brush can be manually fine-tuned with a number of settings and presets to give you the exact touch to your realm of art. Once you start penning that tablet, you won't stop.

Just like a painter physically blends different colors on a palette, the same can be done with the mixer palette in Corel Painter, where the amount and variety of colors mixed decide what shade comes out of it. One can even create swatches to match the theme and mood of a painting. You can select from a plethora of preset textures and pencils, record strokes of a pencil or brush if you need symmetric design, and alternatively you can also use pre-recorded brush strokes. The use of combinations is entirely dependent and limited to one's creativity and imagination.

If a professional sketch artist gets his hands on this application, he can seamlessly make a sketch look like a true-to-life photograph. Hard media variants such as changing the angle of the pen on a drawing tablet would change the way in which shading appears. Even the intensity of the marker changes with the pressure applied on the tablet, which gives a build-up effect on a color. So the more pressure you apply on the tablet, the deeper the color will appear. Also, with the transformation feature one can move, scale, rotate, skew and distort images. If all of this sounds too good to be true, we encourage you to. It is the official online magazine for Corel Painter. Here, artists have displayed their work. In addition to that, you'll find a lot of tutorials, information and sample galleries of Corel Painter.

If painting is not your terrain, you can even start with small projects such as loading a picture and painting on a real photograph. Make tatoos and other designs. Speaking of which, the quick clone feature is a virtual tracing papertype layer placed on top of an image. It lets you trace an outline of a particular portrait or picture and you can then add a personal touch to the resulting sketch. Some features such as divine proportions and perspective grids might only be fully utilized by professionals in the field.