Exploring Brush Controls

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You can apply media to the canvas by using a ready-to-use default brush variant from the impressive Corel Painter brush library. You can also modify a brush variant to meet a particular need. The brush controls are divided into multiple brush control panels that allow you to adjust a brush variant while you work, or alter an existing variant to create a new variant.

Corel Painter also includes an advanced brush controls panel that generates a grouping of brush control panels that are relevant to the currently selected brush. The Edit panel makes it easy to switch between editing the controls that affect brush shape and editing controls that affect brush media.

You can use the brush controls to adjust the Corel Painter brushes in many different ways, such as change their size, shape, angle, flow, and much more. In fact, the Corel Painter default brush variants are built by adjusting the same set of brush controls in order to emulate a real-life painting or drawing tool.

Changes that you make to brush variants, including basic controls such as Size and Opacity, are retained until you restore the brush variant. You can also save custom brushes as the default, as new variants, or as looks. For more information, see Saving and deleting brush variants and Saving a brush look.

Modifying Brush Variants

When you modify a brush variant using the brush controls, the modified brush variant information is stored in the variant’s XML, NIB, STK, and in some instances, JPEG files that are found in the operating system’s User folder:

Users\(user name)\AppData\Roaming\Corel\Painter 2023\Default\Brushes\Painter Brushes folder (Windows)

When you start Corel Painter, the application applies the modified settings to the brush variant, instead of the default settings. However, the default settings are not lost, they remain stored in the application folder. If you decide to reset a brush variant’s default settings, the modified brush variant files are automatically deleted from the Users folder.

To open a brush control panel

To open all general brush controls panels at once

You can also open all brush control panels at once by pressing Command + B (macOS) or Ctrl + B (Windows). To close all brush control panels at once, the General brush control panel must be docked with the other brush control panels.

To use the advanced brush control panel

To close a brush control panel