Adventures in Artrage & Painter
Jun. 8th, 2013 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkAs indicated in my previous post, recently I've been experimenting a lot with digital art programs, much more than I used to. I just got my hands on a copy of Artrage 3.5, and have been having a go at it to compare with Corel Painter, since both programs aim to simulate natural art media. I decided I'm going to be jotting down my impressions as I tinker with the program.
So far:
I'm impressed with Artrage's watercolors. I was impressed with Corel Painter 12's new Real Watercolors, but one of my issues with it is that it's somewhat unintuitive to use if you want to replicate certain watercolor effects. I have very limited experience with real watercolors (most of my traditional work was with pencils and acrylic paint), but I'm pretty sure there should be a pure water brush that you can use to blend colors into the paper, for example. Granted, I had to tweak Artrage a little before I got some really nice results, but even after looking at a bunch of Painter watercolor tutorials, I still feel I have a distinct lack of control over the watercolors in Painter. (I did find some brushes for download that may help, though.) A big part of this has to do with the fact that Artrage has better brush interaction with paper texture than Painter does.
I like Artrage's oil brushes, but admittedly I haven't tested Painter's oil brushes, so I don't feel comfortable making a comparison.
Artrage's palette knives are adequate blenders, but I still think Painter has fantastic blender brushes.
In terms of other brushes, such as pastels, pencils, etc., I find Painter to be superior.
The problem with Painter is that while it's a powerful program, modifying and creating brushes is unintuitive and complex, especially compared to Photoshop. For example, in Artrage, the watercolor brushes have a "thinner" setting that decreases the pigment on the brush while retaining wetness, which is great for blending, and I wish Painter had something that simple. Instead, Painter has a bunch of settings such as settling rate, concentration, weight, etc., but decreasing those can still result in awkward color overlaps.
So far:
I'm impressed with Artrage's watercolors. I was impressed with Corel Painter 12's new Real Watercolors, but one of my issues with it is that it's somewhat unintuitive to use if you want to replicate certain watercolor effects. I have very limited experience with real watercolors (most of my traditional work was with pencils and acrylic paint), but I'm pretty sure there should be a pure water brush that you can use to blend colors into the paper, for example. Granted, I had to tweak Artrage a little before I got some really nice results, but even after looking at a bunch of Painter watercolor tutorials, I still feel I have a distinct lack of control over the watercolors in Painter. (I did find some brushes for download that may help, though.) A big part of this has to do with the fact that Artrage has better brush interaction with paper texture than Painter does.
I like Artrage's oil brushes, but admittedly I haven't tested Painter's oil brushes, so I don't feel comfortable making a comparison.
Artrage's palette knives are adequate blenders, but I still think Painter has fantastic blender brushes.
In terms of other brushes, such as pastels, pencils, etc., I find Painter to be superior.
The problem with Painter is that while it's a powerful program, modifying and creating brushes is unintuitive and complex, especially compared to Photoshop. For example, in Artrage, the watercolor brushes have a "thinner" setting that decreases the pigment on the brush while retaining wetness, which is great for blending, and I wish Painter had something that simple. Instead, Painter has a bunch of settings such as settling rate, concentration, weight, etc., but decreasing those can still result in awkward color overlaps.
