Brushstrokes from Painter

These are three crops from a larger piece. I am working on brush strokes in Painter.  I want my work to have more textures in it.  That is something that makes a painting interesting and gets the viewer’s interest.

Painter has a few ways to show textures.  One way is using papers.  If you use a textured paper, then you have to make adjustments to the brush to get it to show the paper. So in addition to understanding how the papers work, one must also understand the brushes and their grain settings.

Painter comes with many papers.  I can also take any paper texture I like and scan it into the computer and bring it into Painter.  Once it is in Painter, then the paper has to be adjust for lightness, darkness, etc. so the brushes work with it.

I digress, back to brush strokes. Painter’s brushes will do brush strokes just like real-life brushes. But in addition to that, they will do all kinds of fabulous other things.

For instance, the top example has some gradations in the red, orange, yellow area.  That was added with a brush that literally shoots colors out.

Right now I’m focusing mostly on acrylics and oils.  I want to get the richness that those paintings have from their brush strokes. In these examples, I used mostly the acrylic brushes that come with Painter.  I also used a category called Buttery Oils that I downloaded from the very generous Skip Allen.

Anytime you need brushes for Painter, head over to Skip’s blog.  He has tons of fantastic brushes that he shares with the Painter community.  If you download the brushes and like them, be sure to go over the Pay Pal and give a donation to Skip. One of the best parts of Painter is that one can easily make a painting with oils, acrylics, pastels and any other media one would like to toss in.

I have been using Painter for two years.  Before I became ill, I was a textile artist.  I had never painted until I used Painter.  It has been a real adventure first, learning to paint, then learning Painter.  Painter has an extremely steep learning curve.  Now that I am finally familiar with basic painting skills and how Painter works, I’m ready to explore painting.