All Things Painter So Many Brushes, So Little Canvas by John Derry

One of the first things a new user encounters on starting Corel® Painter™ is the immense variety of brushes available: Acrylics, Airbrushes, Art Pen brushes, Artists' Oils, Artists, Blenders, Calligraphy, Chalk, Charcoal, Cloners, Colored Pencils, Conte, Crayons, Digital Watercolor, Distortion, Erasers, F-X, Felt Pens, Gouache, Image Hose, Impasto, Liquid Ink, Oil Pastels, Oils, Palette Knives, Pastels, Pattern Pens, Pencils, Pens, Photo, Sponges, Sumi-e, Tinting, and Watercolor. Phew! What's more, those are just the media categories; some of these categories contain dozens of variants.

How does one begin to use an art store's worth of brushes without suffering a migraine headache? We can intelligently narrow our choices by borrowing from basic design principles and applying them to the Corel Painter brush library. Allow me to explain.

The elements of visual design can be broken down into six entities: line, shape, value, color, texture, and space. Let's take a quick look at these elements, and then I'll apply them to Corel Painter brushes.

Line is directional and can define the edge of an object. A line can be thick, thin, long, short, curved, straight, or a combination of these attributes.

Shape can be geometric or organic, negative or positive. Shape creates rhythm and pattern when repeated, and creates balance or tension, depending on placement.

Value can create the illusion of depth, movement, light and shadow and provide the lightness and darkness of a medium.

Color can express mood and feelings, can be warm or cool, and can provide the illusion of distance. Color can be mixed to make new colors, or mixed for intensity and value.

Texture can be real or simulated, can describe a surface, and can be natural or artificial.

Space can be displayed by overlapping shapes, can be displayed by color, can be two- or three-dimensional, and can be positive and negative.

It is a common practice to balance the six elements of design so that one element dominates and the others are subordinate. Using all of the elements with equal weight in a composition results in a chaotic jumble. It is far better to allow one element to dominate - with one or two other elements playing the role of supporting cast - than to allow all of the elements to vie for attention. With this information under our belts, let's now return to the myriad brushes in Corel Painter.

The elements of design can be loosely applied to the brush categories in Corel Painter, which can be classified into groups. Grouping the categories is not an exact science, and different users would arrive at different results. Here are my basic groupings:

Line: Calligraphy, Felt Pens, Liquid Ink, Pencils, Pens, Sumi-e

Line/Color: Acrylics, Art Pen Brushes, Artists' Oils, Artists, Colored Pencils, Crayons, Gouache

Value: Airbrushes, Blenders, Erasers, Photo

Color: Digital Watercolor, Tinting, Watercolor

Color/Texture: Chalk, Charcoal, Conte, Oil Pastels, Pastels

Texture: Cloners, Distortion, F-X, Image Hose, Sponges

You'll notice that I've partially combined elements to classify some media more fully. I've also left Shape and Space out of the equation because these are generally created by applying the remaining elements. You can use this game of media categorization to occupy both you and your artist friends with hours of lively conversation. The point is that we can now apply the design principles of balance and proportion to our design element-classified Painter brushes.

Let's select Line as our primary element and use Color and Texture as our supporting elements. With our classification system now in place, it is a simple matter of selecting media from the Corel Painter brush library to create an image. I'll select Pens (Line) in the starring role and Digital Watercolor (Color) and Oil Pastels (Texture) as my supporting cast. Using the Simple Water and New Simple Blender Digital Watercolor variants, I create a wash of varying color as a background. I apply subtle color tonalities with the Variable Oil Pastel. On top of this color field, I apply the sinewy lines of a vine with the Scratchboard Tool. A bit more finessing, and I'm done.

I'd be willing to bet that each of my readers visualizes a different result, but I hope that you are imagining a well-composed image, with the line work dominating, atop a pastel field of washed-out color. The moral of the story? Less is more.

Whether you've just conjured up a mess or a masterpiece, it is my intent that you not be intimidated by the vast array of brushes in Corel Painter. Rather, in the Corel Painter brush library, you have a cast of hundreds at the ready, waiting to star in your artwork. By applying a bit of design theory to the brush library, you can intelligently limit your choices to help you clearly express your ideas.

John Derry
Somewhere in Kansas

John Derry is a pioneer of digital painting and one of the original authors of Corel® Painter™. Since 1985, he 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 currently serving as Corel's Painter Ambassador-at-Large. John's Web site is at www.pixlart.com.