- an efficiently natural way to draw and paint digitally.
By David Gell
Introduction
A chance discovery has led me to develop of a range of brushes which allow colour to be directly sampled and loaded from any underlying pixels on the Painter canvas or layer without the use of the eye dropper tool. In Painter 6, there is a keyboard short cut to bring up the eye dropper to sample underlying colour, but this involved 2 separate keystrokes; 'D' to access the eye dropper tool, and then 'B' to return to the brush. This has been greatly improved in Painter 7, with a single opt (alt) click to sample the colour and return to brush mode. Whilst many may prefer the usual keyboard short cuts, I personally find that the direct method of brush loading feels more natural and doesn't seem to disturb the 'flow' of painting. To use the brushes non-contiguously from the point of colour sampling requires the use of a graphics tablet and stylus. I have only been able to test these with a Wacom Intuos tablet, but hopefully they will work with other makes and models.
Not all of Painter's brushes can be successfully converted for this purpose, and in the case of two of the airbrush variants, I have produced alternatives. Another disadvantage is that you are unable to mix/blend colour (due to the required bleed and resat settings), although it may be possible to assign these as custom controls accessible in the Controls:Brush palette. In order to convert your existing brushes to see if they will sample/load colour this way, simply set both Resat and Bleed to 0% in the Well section of the Brush Controls Palette, and ensure that the Opacity controller is set to Pressure in the Expressions section.
In the Time Savers brush library (available for free down load in my brush resource section), nearly all the brushes appear to have pin point colour sampling at the tip of the cursor (although I have not tested this at pixel level). Two brushes have also been included to facilitate making temporary 'on canvas' colour swatch sets, and I'll talk more about these later. The four brushes listed below, appear to sample and load colour on individual brush hairs;
t Opaque Bristle Spray, t Opaque Flat, t P Knife-L'd-Ribbon and t Round Camel- Size.
How to use the brushes
To use or test converted brushes, touch the surface of your graphics tablet with the tip of the stylus at a point where some coloured pixels have been previously laid down on the canvas or layer. You must either work on the same layer as the sample colour resides, or alternatively work on a layer above and check the 'Pick Up Underlying Colour' box in the layers section of the objects palette.
Next, drag the stylus over the surface of the graphics tablet to the point on the canvas/layer where you wish to apply the media of the selected colour. In order for this to work non-contiguously, it is important that the stylus tip maintains contact with the surface of the tablet whist dragging from the point of sampling and that no downward stylus pressure is exerted. As soon as the brush is in the position where the brush stroke is to begin, then downward pressure is applied to the tablet via the stylus. It is possible that you may have to practice this and also play around with the pressure response settings. Below is a demo image of the process;
My initial idea was to switch to using the Time Savers brushes after I had laid down all the colours I wished to use in the image with Painter's normal brushes. I then had the idea that it would be possible to have a temporary colour palette (swatch set) in which to sample from, down one edge of the canvas. I then made two swatch making brushes (included in the Time Savers library) so that swatch sets can be quickly and easily produced. Please click page 2 to discover more about swatch sets.
