All Things Painter Through the Looking-Glass with Corel® Painter™ IX by John Derry

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice discovers a magical place in which neither logic nor the laws of physics seem to apply. Like Alice's looking-glass portal into a distinctly nontraditional world, Corel® Painter™ IX lets you transcend the limits of traditional art-making tools in interesting ways.

Corel Painter is renowned for its uncanny ability to emulate traditional art tools and media. We know that the Natural-Media® tools in Corel Painter—chalk, pencils, and pens—produce expressive marks of a single color. Brushes, like those in the Artists' Oils category, can also be loaded with multiple colors. These tools all provide remarkable simulations of their nondigital counterparts, but what if something other than color could emerge from the tip of the stylus? Let's step through the looking-glass and consider two examples.

First, imagine a brush that sprays whatever you can envision: clouds, flowers, dice, trees, birds, anything. This tool is the Image Hose. Strictly speaking, the Image Hose is a delivery tool, and the bits of imagery it uses originate in nozzle files. Several nozzles are available from the Nozzle Selector flyout (located at the bottom of the toolbox), but you can also generate a custom nozzle from a grouped set of layers.

Suppose you need to fill several areas of an existing image with painted tulips. Following traditional image-making techniques, you would paint dozens of tulips individually into the scene. With Corel Painter, you can paint a dozen or so individual tulip elements, each on its own layer, and create a nozzle file out of the group. You can use this nozzle file with the Image Hose to spray the resulting tulip elements onto the image. Using a pressure-sensitive pen, you can control size, spacing, and angle. Try doing that with any traditional tool!

The beauty of the Image Hose is that it uses the controls found in most time-honored analog tools—such as pressure, tilt, and bearing—to produce expressive nuances in your work. As a result, mark-making with a tulip nozzle becomes as intuitive as drawing with a pencil. Plus, you can create your own on-demand content at any time.

Whereas the Image Hose is ideal for randomized placement and distribution of image elements, the Pattern Pen lets you apply linear repeating elements. Imagine a pen that paints with rope, barbed wire, picket fences, or decorative edging. Content for the Pattern Pen comes from the Pattern library. A special characteristic of Pattern Pen Patterns is that the two short ends of the pattern are seamed together to hide what would otherwise be a noticeable flaw in the applied line.The Pattern Pen is great for creating unique borders, as well as providing an inexhaustible supply of patterned linear content. Try that, traditional counterparts!

Admittedly, you're not likely to use the Image Hose and Pattern Pen every day, but for certain tasks, they are just what you need. They can eliminate much of the repetition and tedium that often accompany creative image-making, and source content can be derived from anything you can imagine. A few minutes spent constructing a nozzle or linear pattern can lead to creative results that you would not have otherwise envisioned.

Now, excuse me while I chase after that rabbit with a pocket watch.

John Derry
Somewhere in Kansas

John Derry is a pioneer of digital painting and one of the original authors of Corel® Painter™. Since 1985, John has leveraged his background in drawing and painting to advance the look and experience of traditional art-making tools on the computer. John has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in Fine Art and is a practicing artist and photographer. He is the Art Director at Strauss Peyton Imaging, a fine art printing company.