Corel Painter Help | Loading multiple colors

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Loading multiple colors

Imagine the ability to load color at a bristle level, picking up different colors with each "hair" of a brush — as though filling tiny ink wells. Imagine also the ability to move multiple colors along with a palette knife, dragging them across your canvas or paper. The Brush Loading feature affects how paint comes off a brush and what happens to the pixels underneath.

When Brush Loading is not active, brushes interact with previously applied colors by sampling underlying pixels and then loading the brush with one new color — the average of those that were sampled. With Brush Loading active, brushes can literally "pick up" existing colors, hair by hair. This capability offers truer color interaction, astounding color variations, and better cloning results.

To paint with multiple colors

Click the Brush Selector on the Brush Selector bar.

In the Brush library panel, click a brush category and a brush variant.

Choose Window

Brush Control Panels

General.

Choose Static Bristle from the Dab Type list box.

Choose Multi from the Stroke Type list box.

Choose Window

Brush Control Panels

Well.

In the Well panel, enable the Brush Loading check box.

This step activates the brush’s ability to pick up underlying colors.

Adjust the Resaturation and Bleed sliders.

The Bleed setting determines how much underlying paint is affected by the brushstroke. A higher Bleed setting, combined with a low Resaturation setting, can enhance the Brush Loading feature. A resaturation value of 0, combined with different levels of bleed, will cause your brush to smear image color, rather than deposit it. In this case, the lower the bleed, the longer the smear.

Choose Window

Brush Control Panels

Spacing.

In the Spacing panel, adjust the Spacing and Min Spacing sliders to create fewer "echo" artifacts in your smeared stroke.

Drag a brushstroke through existing paint to see how the paint is "picked up" from the underlying pixels and moved across the canvas.

It is easier to see the Brush Loading feature if the canvas is not white. To fill the canvas with another color, see Applying a color as a fill.

You can tie brush controls like Bleed to the Controller setting in the Color Expression panel. For example, if you choose Pressure, each stroke bleeds more or less, depending on how hard you press the stylus. For more information, see Expression settings.

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