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With Corel Painter 2015 you can add an extra special touch to your artwork with new, freshly inspirational
Papers ─ Nozzles ─ Images ─ Patterns ─ Weaves ─ Gradients ─ and Flowmaps
Some of the updates are designed specifically for different types of digital artist,
so whether you’re an illustrator or photo artist, you can be sure to find compelling content to work with.
Let’s take a look at the new content in our Media- and Paper Libraries.
The paper you are going to use as your canvas has a huge impact on the final look of your artwork.
As with traditional art media, the results from using a marking tool depend on the texture of the surface to which it is applied.
Corel Painter allows you to control the texture of the canvas to achieve the results you would expect from using traditional media on a given surface
for example, chalk on the sidewalk, pencil on watercolor paper, felt pens on cotton paper, and so on.
In addition to the familiar Paper Textures from the previous version, Painter 2015 now includes brand new papers and watercolor papers for you to experiment with.
Lets try out some of the new papers.
And don’t forget that it’s very simple to capture your own paper textures by selecting some brush strokes or part of an image,
and choosing ‘Capture Paper’ in the Paper Library options.
The Image hose lets you paint with images instead of painting with color.
The images flowing from the hose change as you make a brushstroke.
You can modify the appearance of the default Image hose elements or create your own set of images so you can paint with a unique image series.
When choosing an Image Hose, you can create lines of images based on parameters such as Pressure, Direction, Bearing, Rotation etc.
Want to create your own image nozzles? Then just check out the chapter on Image Hoses in our online user guide.
The images in the Images Panel can be inserted into your Painter document as a new layer.
And the Image Portfolio is a convenient place to store layers as images so that you can use them again.
You can reposition and transform the images,
and you can create your own Image Portfolio libraries to organize images by category.
With Corel Painter, you can apply patterns to an image by filling or painting.
In addition, you can customize patterns by modifying sample patterns or by creating them from scratch.
All patterns, including both the sample and custom patterns, reside in libraries.
And you’ll find more libraries, with additional materials, on the Corel website.
To Paint with a pattern, select a variant from the Pattern Pens brush category and simply paint on the canvas.
Patterns can also be used to fill selections - or even the whole canvas.
Corel Painter also includes an assortment of weave samples that you can apply as fills.
You can also edit a weave sample to make it your own.
In addition, Corel Painter includes a powerful programming language that allows you draft custom weave patterns from scratch.
You can also display a weave as two-dimensional or show the interwoven threads three-dimensionally, complete with shadows.
Weaves reside in default libraries and you’ll find additional content on the Corel Web site.
Let’s move on to our final Media Library - Looks.
A look retains not only all the brush variant settings, but also the paper, pattern, gradient, or nozzle settings used.
A brush variant is not itself associated with information about underlying texture or other elements.
The look, on the other hand, is associated with additional information about a particular variant.
For example, if you customize a brush variant and paper texture to achieve a specific effect that you want to use in the future,
you can save these settings as a look.
When you save a look, it is added here to the Look Libraries panel.
Regardless of a document’s current libraries, when you select a look, you use the elements that are part of that look.
To finish off this tutorial, lets take a look at some of the new Flow maps included in Corel Painter 2015.
Flow maps are similar to paper textures; however, the surfaces that they create have higher peaks and deeper valleys that allow for greater water displacement.
To select a Flowmap, open the Flow Map Libraries panel.
To quickly get started with flow maps, you can choose one of the flow map brush variants.
You can use flow maps when working with Real Watercolor and Particle brushes to create textured surfaces that help direct the flow of paint.
The flow map relief encourages the paint to flow and settle in unique and irregular patterns.
And you can use flow maps in combination with paper texture to retain the paper grain.
The Real Watercolor and Particles brush variants enable flow maps by default. You can experiment and choose a different flow map to produce the effect you like.
We are now going to take a look at the effect of flowmaps on the new, Particle brushes.
All Particle brushes can have their marks influenced by flow maps, and there is a slider in the Particles > General panel for adjusting the strength of the effect.
However, the way that the Particle brushes are influenced by Flowmaps differs to that of the Real Water Color variants,
because for Gravity and Spring particle brushes, the individual particles get pushed by the flow map depending on the strength of the other forces.
For Particle brushes with ‘Flow’ in their names, the effect is much stronger and the particles are ‘magnetized’ to the edges of the flow map and really show up nicely.
I’d just like to mention at this point, that flow brushes don't have to use flow maps, and with the slider turned down, other forces such as chaos will influence their marks.
Let’s try out a couple of Particle brush/Flow Map combinations and adjust the strength of the effect at the same time.
We hope that you enjoyed this short overview of the new content in Corel Painter 2015.
The new customizable papers, gradients, looks, and flowmaps etc. will take your artistic expression to new heights
and allow you to expand your creative output in exciting new ways.