Rangefinder Magazine
December 2004

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Corel Painter IX: by Jeremy Sutton
The “Must Have” Tool

Corel Painter IX, the fastest, most efficient and powerful version of Painter yet released, is a “must have” tool for everyone creating and working with digital fine art images. Painter, your digital art studio, is a perfect complement to Photoshop, your digital darkroom. Both powerful tools should be part of your standard digital toolbox. In this article I illustrate some of the exciting new features of the recently launched Painter IX, such as the wonderful new Artist’s Oils brushes, the improved Brush Tracker, the versatile Custom Palettes and the handy Brush Controls palettes.

How is Painter Different from Photoshop?
Painter IX, while looking, at first glance, similar to Photoshop CS, is a completely different animal. Painter is the tool for any time you want to achieve an organic, rich, natural media hand-painted look and feel to your image. There is some overlap between Painter and Photoshop in basic image manipulation, special effects, selections, text and layers, and considerable compatibility between the two programs (some examples include: similar keyboard shortcuts, alpha channels in Photoshop become Layer Masks in Painter, many layer blending modes are the same, and so on).

Photoshop offers greater image adjustment control with the use of Adjustment Layers and the ability to work in CMYK color mode, while Painter offers an unparalleled range of brushes and art materials, and a phenomenal degree of brush stroke control that far surpasses anything I have seen in Photoshop or any other program.

What Do You Need to Get Going?
The key to using Painter is using hand brush strokes to express your own unique style and personality in your artwork. You will need a Wacom graphics tablet with a pressure-sensitive pen. The two models I recommend for professional work are the Intuos3 6x8 tablet and the Cintiq 18SX. When using the Intuos3, place the spring-loaded “stroke” nib supplied with the tablet, in the Grip Pen before you start—you’ll find it much better for painting than the standard nib. The Cintiq 18SX combines a pressure-sensitive surface with an LCD display (and is therefore very intuitive to use). I have placed handy links on paintercreativity.com for purchase of tablets and Painter IX.

Is It Worth Upgrading From Painter 8?
Absolutely! Painter IX is a much more powerful and stable program than Painter 8. Corel went back through the entire Painter code, some dating back to when it was first created almost 15 years ago, and completely rewrote it. As a result, all brushes work better (the Liquid Inks and Watercolor brushes are dramatically faster in Painter IX as compared with Painter 8), and the program as a whole is more stable. Also, there is a whole new category of brushes, called Artist’s Oils. These have been designed to closer emulate the way traditional oil paint mixes color on the brush and on the canvas as you apply a brush stroke. There are many workflow improvements such as Quick Clone, Iterative Save, lockable brushes in the brush Tracker, and the return of the Custom Palettes and access to the full set of Brush Controls palettes in painting mode.

Figure 1	Figure 2

Case Study Using Artist’s Oils
For this case study (final painting shown in Figure 1) I started with a photograph (the left-hand image in Figure 2) I took of a model, Elena, at a fashion show. My goal was to create a painterly effect, which had something of the richness of color and texture of Pino’s magnificent oils (see www.pino-artist.com/pino-art-collections.html).

New Preferences
My first step was to adjust the Preferences in Painter IX for optimum convenience. The Brush Tracking preference allows me to adapt the pressure sensitivity of the pen to suit my natural hand pressure. The new Customize Keys preference gives the ability to create a custom key shortcut for virtually any menu item or command anywhere in Painter.

	Figure 4

Palette Layout
I then set up my palettes (see Figure 2). Besides the standard Colors palette with its hue wheel and saturation-value triangle, I decided to make use of the new Painter IX default color set, which is based on traditional oil paint colors such as Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red and Cerulean Blue. I reset the Color Set palette to show just the color swatches (you can also have color names displayed if you wish) and customized the swatch size for convenience. I made my own Custom Palette of shortcut buttons for commands I use frequently, such as Save As, Clone and Zoom to Fit. I also dragged a couple of my frequently used brushes into the shortcuts palette. For added convenience I locked a few more of my favorite brushes into the top of the Trackers palette (lockable brushes is new to Painter IX), which saves me fishing around the Brush Selector menus to locate brushes.

Figure 5	Figure 6

Quick Clone
As with all photographs I work on, once I am satisfied with the original source image I have open in Painter, I then make a clone copy. A useful new Painter IX feature for photographers is Quick Clone, which enables you to accomplish several steps in one command. You can set the steps up in General Preferences (Cmd/Ctrl-K). With Quick Clone you can, with one command, make a clone copy of your photograph, clear the clone copy canvas to white, turn on Tracing Paper, and activate Clone Color for the current brush. Let me take a step back to explain cloning for those not familiar with Painter. Imagine the Photoshop Rubber Stamp tool being able to transfer color information from an original photograph to another, identically sized, canvas using the texture of any brush in Painter, whether a chalk, an oil, a watercolor or a pastel. That is the power of cloning in Painter. The artistic possibilities are endless. Not only can you transform your image as if with a hand-painted brush “filter,” you can also use the Tracing Paper feature to look through to the original image for reference. Cloning frees you up from having to get the proportions and color/tonal relationships of your subjects accurate through hand-eye coordination. Instead you can focus on using your hand brush strokes to add energy, emotion, movement, dynamism and focus to your image.

Figure 7	Figure 8

Muck Up
My first brush strokes are large general marks designed to create a rough under-painting that I refer to as a “muck up,” since I am, in effect, mucking up (messing up) the details of the image and creating an abstract composition based on the main areas of color and tone. I use my muck-up brush strokes to capture the flow and energy of my composition. In this example I also chose to introduce additional colors in my muck (the central image in Figure 2). One of the powerful aspects of transforming your photographs into paintings is the additional richness and variety of color and tonal contrasts you can introduce into your image. The muck-up brush I used in this case is Den’s Oil Funky Chunky, one of my all-time favorites (made by Denise Laurent of London), which you can find in the Jeremy Faves custom brush category that comes with my book Painter 8 Creativity: Digital Artist’s Handbook (a completely revised new Painter IX version will be out early 2005 with a whole set of new custom brushes). I initially used Tracing Paper as visual reference while mucking up, but then turned Tracing Paper off and just looked at the original photograph on screen for further reference when I needed to. Tracing Paper can be distracting and prevents you from seeing what you’re painting.

Iterative Save
Iterative Save is a great time-saving workflow device introduced in Painter IX that allows you to conveniently document your process and safeguard your work by saving a series of versions of your image, each with a sequentially numbered file name (_001, _002, _003, and so on). I encourage you to take advantage of this feature. I personally use Save As frequently since that allows me not only include a sequential version number in my file names, but also add short notes as to what brush I used etc.

Figure 9	Figure 10

Sculpting with Blender Bristle
Once my muck up was complete (the entire canvas was covered in brush strokes), I then set about sculpting the forms in more detail with one of the new Painter IX Artist’s Oils brushes called Blender Bristle. I like the way this brush blends with underlying color as it paints. The color falls off with the brush stroke, so it encourages you to paint in brush dabs rather than long strokes. I used the direction and the color of the dabs to sculpt the face, hair and clothes of the subject (see right hand image in Figure 2). I continually adjusted color, brush size and opacity as I applied this brush. (To change brush size use the Brush Controls > Size menu or the Opt-Cmd/Alt-Ctrl shortcut, which allows you to vary brush size by dragging as you paint) .

Soft Clone in Selective Detail
At this stage I wished to start honing in on details such as the eyes, nose, mouth and clothing. I used the Cloners > Soft Cloner brush with low opacity (about 15 percent) and soft pressure to gently bring in some of the original photographic detail. Be wary of bringing in too much detail. Less is more as Walter Murch says in his book In the Blink of an Eye: “You may not always succeed, but attempt to produce the greatest effect in the viewer’s mind by the least number of things on screen. Why? Because you want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience. Suggestion is always more effective than exposition. Past a certain point, the more effort you put into wealth of detail, the more you encourage the audience to become spectators rather than participants.”

Figure 11	Figure 12

Smoothing and Smearing
To smooth out some of the skin areas (Figure 4) I used Acrylics > Captured Bristle with a reduced Resat setting (from 60 to about 15 percent). This gently blends the current color whilst smearing the underlying brush strokes.

Dodge and Burn Final Touch
My final touch, besides my digital signature, was a little Photo > Dodge and Burn to bring out tonal contrast in the key focal areas of the image.

Other Examples
I have included a small before and after gallery of other images I have painted using Painter IX. These images are “Melting” (Figures 5 and 6, based on my photo of professional Tango dancers Chelsea Eng and Moti Buchboot), “Circle of Love” (Figures 7 and 8, based on my photo of Marti, Larry and Ryland), “Cool Bass” (Figures 9 and 10, based on my photo of bassist Marcus Shelby), and “Blow That Sax!” (Figures 11 and 12, based on my photo of saxophonist Jeff Ervin). “Melting” and “Blow That Sax!” both use the new Artist’s Oils. You can see more examples of my Painter artworks at www.jeremysutton.com/.

Actions Steps
1. Purchase, upgrade to, or download the free trial version of Corel Painter IX.
2. Purchase a Wacom tablet, if you don’t already have one.
3. Open up one of your images in Painter, make a clone copy of it (File > Clone or Quick Clone), and start playing!
4. When you’re ready for more instructional information seek out books, DVDs, CDs, classes, seminars, etc. (Besides offering my own books, DVDs and classes, I also have articles, tutorials and links to many other Painter resources and teachers on my web site www.paintercreativity.com/.)

Jeremy Sutton is a portrait artist, author and educator based in San Francisco, known for his lively presentations and engaging teaching style as well as his in-depth knowledge of Painter. Jeremy will be coming out with his new four-DVD tutorial set: Painter IX Simplified for Photographers, and his new book, Painter IX Creativity: Digital Artist’s Handbook, in the next few months. Join his email list at www.paintercreativity.com to be kept posted.