A completely new and innovative feature of Corel® Painter IX is snap-to-path painting. This new feature allows an artist to paint a brush stroke along a path or shape simply by clicking a button on the brush property bar or setting up a keyboard shortcut. This tool makes it easy to paint precise strokes using virtually any brush from the vast selection in Corel Painter IX. Not only can you paint accurate strokes with paths and shapes, but you can easily paint multiple copies of a path or shape.

In this tutorial, we'll look at the snap-to-path feature and how you can best use it.

Begin by opening Corel Painter and creating a new document. Select one of the Corel Painter brushes to make the brush property bar active. Figure 1 shows the Align to Path button on the property bar, which controls the snap-to-path painting function.

Figure 1

Note that the Align to Path button is not available for use. To make the button active, you first need to create a path. Select the Pen tool, and draw either an open or a closed path on your canvas, as shown in Figure 2. Note that the new path has created its own layer.

Figure 2

Select a brush, click the Align to Path button, and draw over your shape. You can see that your brush stroke is constrained to the path that you have drawn.

Figure 3

You can adjust the tolerance area, which is the distance from the path at which the brush snaps to the path, by using the Edit > Preferences > Shapes command, which opens the Shapes page of the Preferences dialog box, as shown in Figure 4. The default is 20, but you can try other settings to see how they affect your stroke. Lower settings result in a less accurate and more random snapping behavior. A higher setting makes the brush easier to handle and produces a smoother snapping behavior. If you check the Paint Hidden Shapes box in the Preferences dialog box, you can paint on shapes that are hidden from view. This option becomes helpful as your image becomes more complicated, or when you have several different shapes within the image.

Figure 4

Because the painted stroke is on a new layer, not on the shape or path layer, you can move the underlying shape without moving the painted stroke. After you move the shape, you can paint a new brush stroke on it, and then move the shape again and paint another stroke, and so on, painting as many copies of the same shape as you want. You can use this feature in creative ways if you plan your work right. Figure 5 shows that the shape can be painted as a rainbow by slightly moving it between brush strokes.

Figure 5

This painted shape would have been difficult, if not impossible, to paint freehand. Because each individual color is on its own layer, you can rearrange the colors to suit your particular needs - for example, you can move the red from the back of the rainbow pattern to the front. You can also paint the same shape in a smaller size by scaling the original shape, as shown in Figure 6. Even though the new rainbow shape is smaller, the strokes retain the original size and characteristics of the brush. This would not have been the case if you had just scaled the original rainbow to a smaller size.

Figure 6

At about this time, I can hear you saying to yourself that while this is all well and good, it really isn't much different from stroking a selection. Let's compare the two methods and see how different the results can be. Figure 7 shows the smaller shape converted to a selection.

Figure 7

Using the same brush you used previously, go to the Select menu, and choose Stroke Selection. A stroke of the brush is automatically drawn around the selection. It is drawn within the selection, on both sides of the selection, or on the outside of the selection, depending on how you have set the selection to behave. You can change this masking behavior by using the small icon in the lower-left corner of your image window.

Figure 8

Although a brush stroke now surrounds the selection, it appears mechanical. The selection is stroked with the brush without regard to how the opacity, size, or any of the other brush attributes are set. Now, let's use the snap-to-path feature to paint on the shape. As you can see in Figure 9, the shape is painted with a stroke that takes into account all of the attributes of the brush, and you can even change the color of your stroke.

Figure 9

Stroking a selection can be useful, but using the snap-to-path feature gives you much greater control over the appearance of the painted shape.

You'll find this feature to be especially powerful when you use it with more complicated shapes. Using the File > Acquire > Adobe Illustrator File command, I bring in a complicated shape that was created in CorelDRAW 12 and saved as an Illustrator file.

Figure 10

This shape would be almost impossible to paint using any freehand method. Although I could create selections from the shape and then stroke the selections, I want more control over the way the image will ultimately look.

The shape is actually a combination of six individual shapes, each of which will be painted separately from the others. The group of shapes appear in the Layers palette. Because I cannot paint on a group of objects, I am going to go into the Layers palette and expand the group, so that I can paint on each individual shape.

Because the shape is complex, I am going to hide each individual shape as I paint along it to improve the visibility of the brush stroke I am painting. I make the layer of each individual shape active and then paint on the shape using a brush of my choice. Figure 11 shows the painting in progress.

Figure 11

I continue to select each individual shape and paint the remaining parts of the image. Figure 12 shows all the shapes painted and made visible. You can see that the stroke followed each shape accurately.

Figure 12

For the snap-to-path feature, you can also use any of the selections that ship with Corel Painter in the Selection Portfolio, or any custom selections that you create. Remember to convert them to a shape by using the Convert to Shape command from the Select menu (Figure 13).

Figure 13

Figure 14 shows the selection converted to a shape, ready to have the brush stroke painted.

Figure 14

In this last example (Figure 15), I have used several different brushes to paint a nice red outline around the heart shape, duplicated and scaled the shape several times, and filled the canvas with heart shapes of varying sizes. Make sure that you experiment with many different brush types to find the ones that you like.

Figure 15

This, to me, is one of the main benefits of this new feature in Corel Painter IX.5 - the ability to paint repetitive shapes all over an image but with slight variations within each individual instance.

As with anything new, this feature takes some getting used to, but its potential is limitless, especially if you have a large numbers of objects or if you paint in a highly controlled style.

If you are involved in painting mechanical or artificial objects, give snap-to-path painting a try. It makes painting carefully defined strokes a snap!