Understanding brushes

Corel Painter offers users a wide range of preset brushes that are designed with the real media in mind, so you can predict how a brush will behave.

In an art store, if the brushes in one aisle don’t produce the results you want, you can try a different aisle. Similarly, with Corel Painter, individual brushes, known as brush variants, are stored in the Brush library panel in different brush categories. You can use the brush variants as they are, or you can adjust them to suit your purposes. Many artists use brush variants with only minor adjustments — to size, opacity, or grain (how brushstrokes interact with paper texture).

To modify a brush variant extensively, or to create a new brush variant, you can adjust the brush controls. For more information, see Adjusting brushes with brush controls or Saving and deleting brush variants.

Most Corel Painter brushes apply media, such as a color, gradient, or pattern, to an image. However, some brushes make changes to media already in the image. For example, the Just Add Water brush variant (in the Blenders brush category) smudges and dilutes existing colors in the image with smooth, anti-aliased brushstrokes. Using one of these brushes on a blank area of the canvas has no effect.

Corel Painter includes a batch of Natural-Media brushes that use a media application method called "rendered dab types" to produce wonderfully realistic, continuous, smooth-edged brushstrokes. They are fast and more consistent because the brushstrokes appear as you draw, and are not created by applying dabs of color. In fact, you can’t draw fast enough to leave dabs or dots of color in a brushstroke. These brushes allow for rich features that are not possible with the application of dab-based media. You can take better advantage of tilt and angle, and you can paint with patterns or gradients. For more information, see General controls: Dab types.

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