Corel® Painter™ IX includes two watercolor brush categories: Watercolor and Digital Watercolor. Watercolor brush variants require a watercolor layer, while Digital Watercolor strokes can be applied directly to any layer, including the canvas. For example, if you're applying watercolor effects to a photo image, Digital Watercolor brush strokes can be applied directly to the image. If you're creating a realistic watercolor from scratch, however, the Watercolor brush variants allow colors to flow, mix, and absorb more realistically.

Watercolor
The Watercolor brush variants in Corel Painter produce natural-looking watercolor effects. The Water controls allow you to adjust brush size, control diffusion, and determine how the paper texture will interact with the brush strokes.

You can control the amount of diffusion in a brush stroke.

You can control the paper texture on the Papers palette.

Watercolor brush variants paint onto a watercolor layer, which enables the colors to flow, mix, and absorb into the paper. The watercolor layer is created automatically when you first apply a brush stroke with a Watercolor brush variant.

You can edit the Watercolor layer as you would any other layer without affecting the canvas or other layers in the image. For example, you can draw pencil outlines on the canvas and then overlay watercolor shading without smudging the pencil lines.

The watercolor layer also lets you control the wetness and evaporation rate of the paper to effectively simulate natural media. You can also wet the entire Watercolor layer to activate further diffusion, or dry the watercolor layer to keep the completed brush strokes intact.

Digital Watercolor
The Digital Watercolor brushes paint directly on the Canvas layer or a default layer so you can create effects similar to those of Watercolor brushes without using a separate layer.

Digital Watercolor has been significantly enhanced in Corel Painter IX. Paint stays wet between sessions, enabling users to start one session where the last one ended. Settings such as Diffusion, Opacity, and Wet Fringe control the appearance of the stroke.

The wet fringe of digital watercolor brush strokes can be changed dynamically, so you can experiment with different settings after the brush stroke has been applied.

Digital Watercolor brush strokes with different fringe settings.