The Studio Journal: Update on Corel Painter

Friday, February 01, 2019

Update on Corel Painter

Less than a year ago I began working with Corel Painter 2019, an update of Painter, a venerable program that has been available for a long time to graphic artists and others. As expected, the incredibly rich program gives opportunities for beautifully realized images. And also as expected, the sheer complexity of it makes progress toward mastery a difficult task.

"Joe," 2018, digital drawing

Painter began in the 1990s as one of the first digital drawing programs. Painter, though similar in some ways to other image editing programs, was actually intended as a way to emulate traditional media digitally. That is, to make the resultant image look like, say, an oil painting and furthermore to make the experience emulate the materials in question. That is, a "watercolor" digital tool behaves like a traditional loaded brush--the color spreads in a familiar way when the brush is touched to the "paper" surface. And the surface behaves like paper with different finishes and absorbencies.

Drawing and painting to learn the program has been a steady pursuit these past months, but most of my digital work has been with another program. Painter is useful though, because you can emulate any kind of image you'd like, from charcoal to graphite to watercolor, or oil paint. The drawing portion of the interface was simple enough to learn and combining a bit of knowledge of layers plus a fairly simple tool set made drawing come more quickly. The image to the right is a drawing of the famous 20th century illustrator, J.C. Leyendecker, done from a reference. The date of the drawing is only a few weeks after acquiring the program. Learning to emulate traditional oil painting is more difficult owing to the complexity of the traditional medium.

"American Sphinx," 2018, digital mixed media

If one is to emulate oil painting in pixels, there are properties of oil paint that need consideration. For example, oil paint is variably transparent and can be modified with various additives to be more or less so. Oil paint varies in thickness and in flow, depending on how it is compounded and on how it is thinned or thickened. Furthermore, oil paint behaves differently depending on the surface to which it is applied. And so on. Painter is said to be up to the complexity of oil painting,

The image to the above, a portrait of a 1950 Ford pickup truck I once owned, is a melding of drawing with dark colors and layering of additional colors using various tools in the Painter assortment (there are said to be more than 900). This is based on an old graphite drawing I've had in my studio for years. As effective as this image turned out to be, it certainly doesn't emulate an oil painting.

"Frozen Cherries," 2018

Learning Painter 2019 (indeed, any digital art program) requires repetition, practice and careful attention to detail. For me, first steps have involved relatively simple surfaces and brushes. Rather than go deeply into digital devices I chose to attempt to reproduce reference images without any particular emphasis on surface or brush modifications. While that approach can provide interesting images like the one to the right, learning to more closely emulate the look and feel of oils seemed worth the time, so I decided to take on making copies of masterworks of the past.

In Painter Part 4 I posted a progressive series of images made as I copied a portrait by Rubens of the Duke of Buckingham. Although I didn't post a final image, the progression posted shows remarkable similarity to the look of oil paintings. Below is a final iteration of the work shown here last summer. While the finish is considerably less than the Rubens original, since the goal was learning the program rather than faithfully copying the master, this study was very useful. Continuing in that vein--copying masterworks--will be the next step in learning to use Corel Painter 2019.