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I prefer to mix my colors like Real Oils and load my brush with color from my palette.
How can I do that in Painter. The tool you want is the Mixer palette, it's
a virtual mixing area that blends color together much like traditional
paint media. Many of Painter's brushes can be loaded with
multiple colors from the Mixer and even applying to an image.
Let's take a look at it. Now traditional artists typically mix oils
and various types of material on a mixing surface,
that's what the Mixer palette provides you, and in fact I can even get color,
so if I want to work my traditional colors I can select from other palettes like the
Color Sets or the Color Wheel. And basically what it let's me do is go in
and lay some paint down, get another color and you can see it actually starts to mix
these colors together for me. So this gives me a very close approximation
to working with traditional oils. I am going to go through and show you a little
bit of how the various controls in here work. Because there is a lot of flexibility and
how things mix in the mixing area. You'll see that there is actually two little
icons here on the left that look very similar. The actual painting brush is the second icon.
The first icon is what's called Dirty Mode, and what that does and what it's doing right
now is if I start mixing a color, let's just grab something little different
here, it's just like real paint. Each stroke picks up the previous color at
the end of the stroke and it dirties the brush, so you are just
going to get dirty color. If I turn that Off however now when I paint
you'll see that every stroke begins with a fresh load of that color
and so for most mixing I find that turning off Dirty Mode.
It may not be as real as real paint, but it actually is a little easier
to mix colors you want rather than contaminate your brush all the time.
So if you want the real traditional mixing certainly you can turn on this Dirty Mode,
but my advice is to typically leave it Off and only mix with the actual Mixer and not
have this Dirty Mode affecting the colors. So let's clean that Off and now I am going
to go ahead again and let's mix a few more colors, let's take some Magenta here
and move up here and grab some Rose and let's get some Yellow.
OK, now I want to start painting with these colors.
Maybe we will just add a couple more at the cool end of the spectrum here, I am going
to go right in here. What you can see I think just watching this
happen how much you can either sense of mixing very much as you would in traditional
media. Now to start to use this I am going to use
a brush that is sensitive to colors on the Color palette
and you'll see in a moment what I am talking about here.
I am going to go up to the Artist Oils and select the Blender Brush, and normally I will
just want to maybe get a single color from my mixed
color. So the first eyedropper will pick up an individual
color and allow me to paint with it. OK, so we are painting with various colors
and you'll see that these brushes do have a very realistic tendency to blend
and mix colors together, that's just one category of Painter brush, there are very many possibilities
but you are seeing one really nice application of a brush that knows how to mix color on
the fly. Now let's go to the next category and that's
the little dropper with the circle around it.
This picks up multiple colors. So if I go to a location like let's take something
obvious right there, you'll see now my brush is what's called a Loaded Brush,
I am literally painting with multiple colors across the width of the brush.
So much like a traditional artist will paint they will mix several colors on the palette
and then they will pick up color and actually have that additional character
of multiple color within the brush stroke, and when you really know how
to use this, you can get some amazing effects with the fact that you are putting multiple
colors across the width of the brush. So the Mixer palette basically gives me the
ability to go in and actually mix my colors, and one last tool I want to show you is the
palette Knife, this sets me go in and it's just a Blending tool,
it's not laying down any color, but this is yet another tool so that I can take two colors
and mix them together. So you've got both Paint Applying tools as
well as Paint Mixing tools. All the functionality on here really gives
you a remarkable degree of expressive color in brush application
that is very similar to what you are going to get in traditional media.
The Mixer palette enables a remarkable degree of expressive color and brush application.
And the best part is, you'll never run out of paint.