Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Working with Painter Junior and Painter Pro



I've got my new tablet working. When I draw on it I use the vertical setting, but for this demonstration I wanted to show you the differences in Painter Element 4, (I call it Junior), which comes as free software with Wacom tablets and tablet laptops, and Painter X (I call it Pro) which is the professional version of the software.

I did this sketch on my tablet. Just a silly picture of raining shoes. This is Painter Junior. When you choose a brush, a panel slides out which makes it easy to see what you want. It's rather playful, and it remembers which brush you chose in which order so it's easy to grab that brush you liked again. I like the 2B pencil and a brush called "new simple water" which the Pro doesn't seem to have. You can see how jolly all the dabs of color are.



This is the interface for Pro. Doing the Photoshop thing, which is not as much fun. But it has a zillion brushes and features, and all sorts of image hoses and cloning possibilities, which I'm sure are much fun once you get a feeling for them.



I quickly colored the image in on a layer below the drawing. I liked the feeling of line in the drawing-- much more responsive than either Photoshop or Flash for my way of working. I hold my pen very lightly.



Close up of the image. That's all the art I did. I stopped there. This was just a demo.



When I reopened the identical file in Pro it had taken on a woodblock texture. I have no idea why. I saved it as a jpeg, and went back to Junior for lazyman fun.



Weird that the two versions would handle the same RIF file differently.



They have a variety of artist's styles that will repaint your image in real time. This one is classical oil painting. You can go in and refine it within the style chosen. It's kind of outrageous and great fun to see your nothing special sketch turned into something so expressionistic while you watch.


Here's another one. I think this was called wet water color. I was tempted to shoot a video of the painting while-u-wait, but I don't have a tripod. Painter Pro also has this auto painting feature, but it's accessed more easily, for a beginner like me, in Junior.



one more, kind of Jawlensky in feeling and ever so much better than the rough sketch I actually drew and painted.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your original drawing is great; the rest is just special effects.

Namowal (Jennifer Bourne) said...

I agree with sal- the original drawing is darling. It was fun seeing different versions of it.
Weird how Pro threw in the extra texture.

Sally said...

but but- if you could transfer the Painter versions to canvas, on the sly, they'd be gallery worthy, which the drawing would never be.

Linda Davick said...

You call a picture of raining shoes silly???

Have you tried using the paint bucket to fill in color? You can select the inside of the black line on one layer and use the selection on the layer underneath to pour the paint into. I'm a fan of solids more than textures. But I do kind of like the classical oil painting style.

You know that you can put canvas through a printer. You can put paper towels––all kinds of things through a printer. Then if the printer breaks; just buy a new one. It costs basically the same as buying ink; and a new one comes loaded with ink.

I had never heard of Jawlensky! Then I found a big beautiful book of his on the sale table. I took it home and cut all the pages out and taped all the faces to the living room wall.