Inkspiration Brushes for Corel Painter

Possibly doubling for Chinese calligraphy style brush strokes, the Adrom, Bralelith, Cerranor, Dauwen and Eliron variants utilise stylus tilt and bearing to produce very loose, irregular strokes which could conceivably have been applied with a very worn and uneven brush, or the end of a small branch even. In fact, I was originally going to name these after Ents; the wonderful tree-like characters in The Lord of the Rings. Being concerned with copyright/ trademark issues however, I instead used a Mac name generating application; Name Maker 1.0.

When creating new forms with these variants, I use quick, short and randomly orientated strokes, whilst changing the angle of the stylus, and create a selection of small thumbnails for later appraisal. Although the general look from these variants is similar, they each have their own individual personality. I have added another variant, the Em Dry Camel, which can produce smaller, pointed strokes if applied with low stylus pressure.

For those interested in inspiration from random shapes, I can highly recommend Andrew Jones’ Thumbnail Demo video download (only US$ 15 at time of writing), and the wonderful and free Alchemy application.

Note that stylus tilt interaction may not be available on all models of graphics tablet.

Used again in combination with stylus tilt and bearing, as the name suggests, the Gasket variant can produce internally open shapes with a gasket-like appearance.

The Ink Bucket applies ink with attitude. Used with gentle stylus pressure, this variant will apply a smaller, rounded stroke, but as pressure is increased and the stylus tilt angle becomes more acute (less than 90 degrees), brush stroke size will increase significantly, and irregular splashes of ink will appear, relative to tilt and bearing.

Applying more than one Colour

When more than one colour/ value is used in combination with many of these variants on the same Liquid Ink layer, there will often be a visible softening of colour where one stroke overlaps another. To avoid this, simply create a new Liquid Ink Layers to apply each additional colour used. Using individual layers is also useful in making layer opacity adjustments, as many of these variants do not respond to less than 100 percent opacity settings in the Brush Controls/ Property Bar.

For more angular forms, the Inked Palette Knife and Tangram variants are a good choice. The Angle Expression is set to Bearing for the Inked Palette knife, whilst the Tangram brush strokes are normally applied like a stamp, with multiple angular strokes being automatically generated (Angle Expression set to Random).

Note that due to changes in Painter’s brush engine, the Tangram variant is not compatible with the Painter 7/8 version of the brushes.

The Splat Shapes 1 and 2 variants are used as stamps (i.e. the strokes are applied as dabs by not moving the tip of the stylus) to generate random organic forms.

For the Twister Direction and Twister Source variants, the brush angle changes automatically, based on stroke either direction or source (currently selected pattern) luminosity. In the case of the Twister Source variant, the magnitude of deviation can be further influenced by changing the Patten Scale value in the launched Patterns palette, or by simply selecting a different pattern.

Note that due to changes in Painter’s brush engine, the Twister variants are not compatible with the Painter 7/8 version of the brushes.

A selection of Eraser variants have been included in the library to further add diversity and refine your current brush strokes. Please note however that I have experienced Painter 11 randomly crashing when using the Eraser tool selected from the Toolbox palette to erase media on a Liquid Ink layer. Please see the thread Liquid Ink crashes Painter 11 at the Painter Factory.

Variants with the word Resist in their name could be used as an eraser, but will still retain their resist property when applying additional ink and colour strokes directly over the top. Alternatively, random invisible strokes may be applied to a transparent region of a Liquid Ink layer, and ink/ coloured media applied over this. In this case, some areas will effectively be masked to prevent coloured media being applied in these regions.

Liquid Ink is essentially comprised of two components; the Ink (which is always black) and Color (which can also be black or any colour/ value selected from the Colors palette). In the image above, blue and black colour has been applied by using the Round Colorize variant, directly over media applied in black using the Bralelith variant. The Soften Color Only variant was then applied over one half of the orange and blue regions.

Note that the Round Colorize variant will not mark transparent regions a Liquid Ink layer, and you may also have some success with lowered brush opacity.

The Soften and Simplify variant has been used (bottom right in above image) to soften the edges and simplify (pool together) the form of the original brush ‘Ink Plus Color’ brush stroke. This variant may also be used with very gentle stylus pressure to soften edges with the minimum of pooling.

Note that the Soften and Simplify variant will not have any effect upon the ‘Color Only’ component.