Some sample pages from Getting Started with Painter.

About a month ago, I published my first book (”Getting Started with Painter”), first as an ebook, soon followed by a paperback version. The ebook was priced at $19.95, and the paperback at $29.95. These prices were a bit higher than I had hoped. After some research and basically getting more familiar with the whole publishing process, I’ve been able to bring the prices of both editions down–a lot.

The eBook version is now only $9.95. The paperback is just $19.95, which is low when you consider it’s a full-color book and nearly 90 pages long. The ebook and the paperback are nearly identical to each other in content (there are additional instructions for downloading the images and brushes with the paperback, while the ebook download contains those files.) The book is an anthology of the best beginner tutorials for Painter, as seen here in Digital Image Magazine from 2008 to 2010. Click here to go to the ordering page. Here’s a summary of what’s covered.

Intro: Would Leonardo Have Used Painter?

Getting Started With Corel Painter

Painter Brush Basics

Create Your Own Custom Brushes

Basic Portrait Painting Techniques

Put Life Into Old School Portraits

Colorizing Vintage Photos

Painting Shiny, Curly Hair

A Watercolor Bridal Portrait

How to Paint a Cloud

Quick and Easy Photorealistic Water Drops

Create Realistic Texture with Painter’s Papers

Pet Portraits in Pastel

Working with Layers

10 Tips for Turning a Photo into a Painting

Another sample from the book. Click on it to order

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Here it is! As promised, our very first eBook.

A while back, we ran a reader’s poll, to see if there was any interest in a eBook. A few hundred people responded, and 80% or so indicated that they would be interested. So I got to work. At first, I was going to include every tutorial from the last two years, but I soon realized that would be too much. I decided, instead, to make this first eBook just about Painter. Most of the tutorials written in the last two years have been about Painter, so it seemed logical to start there.

If you’d like to learn more, there is now a link at the top of every page on the blog, called “eBook”. That’ll take you to the ordering and information page. Or, click here. Next to that, there’s another new link, for a new page containing the five videos I’ve produced so far. If you like the videos, you’ll be especially interested in the book, since it includes the same lessons covered in the videos.

Most of the content in the book comes from the blog, which you can access for free, here on the blog. One problem with blogs, however, is that older material gets buried quickly, and can be hard to find. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been wanting to gather the best Painter information together into book form. It’s in a logical, progressive order, while my weekly posts are not. If you want all of the best tutorials at your fingertips, in a searchable PDF file, or if you’d just like to help contribute to the site, then by all means, order a copy. There’s also a new chapter about how cloning works (companion to the first video) as well as how to set up your workspace, and how to create a custom palette. Most of the tutorials are about how to turn photographs into paintings, as well as how to use Painter.

Here’s a look at one two-page spread:

Ordering is safe and secure. You can use your debit or credit card, or a PayPal account. You can download right after the purchase. I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks of “Getting Started with Painter.” If there are other topics you’d like to see in a future book, please leave me a note in the comments section. Thanks again for your support and encouragement!

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Chad Baldwin begins with a pencil sketch, and paints the cartoon in Corel Painter.

As you may know, Digital Image Magazine is a one-man outfit. It’s just me, Bob Nolin, here behind the curtain. Cartooning is not something I do, and so there’s definitely been a big hole in the tutorial content. I recently stumbled across Chad Baldwin’s website, and was very impressed. If you are into cartooning, character design, lighting, or getting started with Painter, I recommend that you take a look at his site.

Chad Baldwin is a successful graphic designer, photographer, and cartoonist. To create his bright, humorous cartoons, Chad uses Corel Painter. Like many cartoonists, Chad begins with a black and white sketch. Then, he takes a picture of the sketch with his iPhone, and uploads it to his computer. He prefers Painter, saying that Photoshop feels “clunky” to him for this sort of work.

He has recently produced several excellent videos showing how he uses Painter to create his cartoons. The videos are professional quality, easy to follow, easy to see (nice, big, clear screen shots), and fun to watch. The videos are produced in high definition to run on your computer (Mac or PC) using Quicktime, after download. Chad has a nice, pleasant and professional-sounding speaking voice, and he guides you confidently along step by step. Artwork is included so you can follow along. Here are the available videos.

How to Draw Cartoons with Chad –– The Basics is a one-hour video to introduce you to the techniques Chad uses to draw cartoons. You can use Painter or Photoshop, but a pencil and paper will do, too.

Exploring Character Design is an hour-long video all about using layers to help you work through variations as you develop a unique character. The included file is for Photoshop, not Painter.

Creating 3D Cartoons Using Layers consists of three videos totaling over 2 hours. The first part is an introduction to Corel Painter’s interface: the brush, the color picker, etc. This is the place to start if you’re new to Painter. Part Two introduces you to Layers, which are key to Chad’s working method. The third part ties it all together with a hands-on project, using what you’ve learned. At the end of two hours and twenty minutes, you are using Corel Painter and creating 3D cartoons. Not too shabby! Files included are brushes for both Photoshop and Painter, plus a Quick Key Command Guide.

Lighting the Cartoon Creatures shows how to bring your pencil sketch to life in full color. Chad explains how to achieve the 3D effect using lighting techniques. The videos total 2 hours. It begins with the Basic Painting Kit, which consists of one 18 minute video where Chad walks you thru the basics of loading brushes and getting yourself familiar with the interface of Corel Painter. Brushes for Painter as well as a blender brush for Photoshop are included. The remainder is all about how to model form in color, without resorting to dead black and white for your shadows and highlights. As Chad says, you’ll soon be creating cartoons that seem to pop off the page.

Here you can see six steps of the process from sketch to finished cartoon.

Vector Toons Using Adobe Illustrator CS4 shows how to convert a sketch into a vector image, instead of a bitmap or raster image, as in Painter. Since I’m just beginning to learn vector art myself, I was glad to see that Chad has this one covered.

In the interests of full disclosure, I do receive an affiliate payment for sales originating from this article. I would not, of course, promote any product or service that I didn’t think was worth your time and hard-earned money. With that said, I do hope you’ll stop by www.CartoonPaint.com and check out these videos. I think you’ll like them.

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An example of the kind of damage you can inflict on your photos using free online photo editors. Fotoflexer was my partner in crime for this image

Here’s a list of 20 web-based photo editing applications. All of them are free, or have a decent free option. Some of these include features which, only a few years ago, were not seen outside of serious desktop apps like Photoshop or Corel Photo Paint. Now, thanks to the Interwebs, now you, too, can do awful, unspeakable things to your best friend’s face (see above). These applications run inside your browser, which means you don’t need to download and install a program to use them. However, you will need to upload your photo to work on it, unless it’s already “in the cloud” somewhere, like Flickr or Photobucket. I don’t think even the most powerful of these apps is ready for professional, production usage. But for millions of online creative types (you know who you are), they are just what is needed. And the free price doesn’t hurt!

There are three rough categories I’ve used to group these apps:

• Full-featured Photo Editors
• Snapshot Editors
• Just For Fun

Full-featured Photo Editors

Aviary is a whole online suite of applications. Phoenix is similar in many ways to Adobe Photoshop, with layers, filters, brushes, and similar features. Aviary also includes a vector drawing tool, along with four other apps. Aviary is also available on Facebook as an app.


Mersica founder and CEO Mario Gomes Cavalcanti says he “wanted to create a graphics tool that combines Desktop Publishing (DTP) with image painting, vector drawing and merchandise printing. This is what I came up with after 5 years of work.” The editor, still in beta, is called GFX Editor. One of it’s strengths is the ability to create designs for sale on Zazzle merchandise, such as sneakers, coffee mugs, and t-shirts. Expect to spend a good bit of time learning this tool. There’s a lot here.


We’ve reviewed Sumo Paint before (here), and it just continues to get bigger and better. Sumo is, like Painter, an image editor and a painting application. Like Aviary’s Phoenix, Sumo looks very much like Photoshop. So if you’re familiar with Photoshop, the learning curve is almost nil. There are many filters and tools, quite a few unique to Sumo. This is the free tool.
For $19, you can own Sumo Pro, which you download and install on your machine. It uses Adobe AIR technology, which means it will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Though I haven’t tried it yet, I’m sure the desktop Pro version runs faster and is more stable than the online version. Plus, you can run it without an Internet connection. Kudos to Sumo for offering both versions.

Snapshot Editors

Splashup, formerly Fauxto, strides the line between full-featured editor and simple snapshot editor. It includes layers, layer effects, brushes, filters, and others familiar to Photoshop users. Splashup works hand in glove with Facebook, Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, and Photobucket.


Splashup Light is a downloadable, down-scaled version of Splashup. You can install it on your desktop or laptop. Like it’s big brother, Splashup Light is free.


Google acquired Picnik a few months ago. Now they own an online editor as well as their desktop editor, Picasa. Both are free, though there is a paid, premium option. You can upload files to Picnik, and exchange photos between your online social network sites, like Facebook and MySpace.



Pixenate has the usual photo-enhancement tools, as well as some fun ones, add a heart-shape frame, apply a sepia tone, or even an oil-paint effect. There’s a hook into Flickr, as well as into Zazzle, to turn your image into a coffee mug or greeting card.



The free version of Snipshot offers far less than the other apps in this list. Filter effects are only available to paid subscribers. It’s hard to see why anyone would pay for such a barebones product when there are much better, free options available.


Pixlr is another program that is more than a simple red-eye remover tool. It has layers, layer masks, a dozen filters, a bloat/shrink tool, brushes, a smudge tool and a blur tool…really, it looks a lot like a “lite” version of Photoshop. There doesn’t seem to be the usual hooks into the social community.


Despite the rather tacky design and ads scattered about, Lunapic looks like a lot of fun. There are a slew of cool effects, from instant Obama-style poster, Warhol, painted, sketched, even add canvas texture. Want to see your face on the hundred dollar bill? They’ve got it. Plus, you can bring in photos from your other online photo accounts, like Flickr. Lots of easy-to-use effects and enhancements.


Last time I checked, this was called “Photoshop Express.” Now it’s just Photoshop.com, which could be a tad confusing. This is Adobe’s entry into the field of free online photo editors. Clicking on the “Test Drive” button caused Firefox to go blooey, so I’m not able to report on how it works. I’m betting it’s a good, simple snapshot enhancement tool, but that’s just a guess.



Fotoflexer impressed me quite a lot. It has a very nice, clean interface, very easy to use. Yet it has a lot to offer: effects, decorations, animations, hooks into MySpace, Flickr, etc. Support for layers, but this seems to be mainly so you can create a collage of overlapping photos, which is fun. You can select areas to delete, and that works pretty darn well. And of course, up top we saw how much fun we can have messing with the morphing tools. There is a nice “remove blemish” tool, though the “remove wrinkle” tool was a bit heavy-handed. There’s a lot more here, so check it out.

Just for Fun

Befunky almost didn’t make this list, due to their being quite in your face about paid options, starting at $4 a month. However, their effects are some of the best I’ve seen, even compared with professional filters in Photoshop. Somebody did some serious work on these. But if you want them for free, your options are limited to most, not all, of the effects, and they tack on a URL in the bottom right. The oil painting filter was especially nice. The Goodies section (adding eyeglasses, etc.) was not so well done. So that’s Befunky.


Scrapblog is for digital scrapbooking. Upload your photos, then get to work creating designer albums and books, invitations and cards. Get them printed or publish them online. There are some free themes (templates), but most will cost you “credits.” Or you can start with a blank page and design your own theme.


Rollip has a simple mission in life. It takes your uploaded photo and applies one of 40 filters to it, then gives it back to you. The filters tend to make your photo look old, as though it were taken years ago and the film sat in the camera for a long time. If you’re too young to remember film, never mind.


Photovisi is a service that lets you create photo collages. Upload a bunch of photos, load them into one of their templates, and boom: instant collage. Download it or bring it into Zazzle to make a nice gift. Neat!


Morphthing combines two faces into one. Mix Brad Pitt with Barack Obama and see what you come up with. Or, upload your own and do unspeakable things with photos of your friends.


Instead of a plain old blog, Glogster lets you combine words with images and music to tell your story. It’s a community site with a unique idea.


DoInk (pronounced Do Ink) is a neat site, especially for kids. Create drawings and then animate them. Next, download them, or upload your creation to YouTube, and be the next viral sensation. Or just print out your artwork on a t-shirt. There are tutorials and a community forum to help you get started.


This site is a lot of fun. Add your face to a famous movie scene or the cover of Time magazine, create animated GIFs to send in emails, or upload to MySpace and Facebook. There are a lot of templates to use, all free.


Flauntr is a site created by FotoDesk, which does photo printing. You can add your photos to a template to make a card, do standard photo editing, and other fun stuff. I suppose you can then print out your work, somehow, but honestly, their beautiful interface was impossible to use. I was lost. If you find the “Apply” button, drop me a note. I think they may have forgotten it.

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Free stock photos are in demand, if our readers are any indication. Our article “25 Free Stock Photo Sites” has been read more than 360,000 times since it was published about two years ago.

Since then, we’ve received suggestions from readers for sites we missed in the first list (and some sites that didn’t exist two years ago). So it’s time for a second list, pushing the number of sites way past 25. Thanks to everyone who left an email or comment suggesting a site.

Caveats: Note the terms of use for each site. Some of these sites offer free images in addition to images for a fee. Keep in mind that “Royalty Free” does not mean the images are free; it means that you don’t need to pay the photographer a royalty each time you use the image. These sites offer free royalty-free images.

If your blog is news-related in any way, shape, or form, you need to check out Picapp. Let’s say you want to blog about last night’s Oscars. Picapp has red carpet photos, taken last night, that you can use on your blog now, free. I’m not making this up. The photo will appear on your blog with a wee bit of advertising, but still. For the news, sports, celebrity, travel, fashion, and entertainment blogger.

Freeimages offer more than 3000 medium-resolution stock photos in 75 galleries, as well as marketing tips, links, wallpapers, templates, and other goodies.

Budget Stock Photo has no photos of its own. Rather, it contains some rather long lists of other sites hosting free stock photos. You could spend days here, so grab some coffee (or tea) and hit the lists!



Photo Everywhere has free travel stock photos, especially from the UK, categorized by geographical region. Link back required.



Photoree strikes me as similar in style to Google Image search. Free registering seems necessary. Also, note this warning: “Avoid recommending photos containing nudity, if possible.” So, do try and restrain yourself.



Photogen has a nice search feature, based on tagged photos. Web usage is unrestricted, but free registration is required.



Okay, I know what you’re thinking at this point. “Thousands of free images. Is that the best you can do?” Well, how would you like to try MILLIONS?! Both Flickr and Wikimedia house a bazillion images that are under the Creative Commons license. For this, a large coffee urn will be required. Good luck. (Wikimedia’s CC image are here.)



This blog offers free texture images, and (this is cool) they encourage everyone to upload their own textures to share. What a great idea!



Free Stock Photos has over 10,000 free stock photos for download, nicely grouped into a bunch of categories.



Acobox is unique in that they host all of their photos for you, in different sizes. Just select your desired size and alignment, and Acobox delivers the HTML for you to add to your blog. No need to download. Pretty neat.



Wallpaper Stop has a lot of wallpapers. 12,000, give or take. And they are big and high def. Very nice. Sign up and get free wallpapers in your inbox once a week.



Free Digital Photos has a good idea: give away low-res versions of photos, and sell high-res versions for a few bucks. The low-res (640px) are perfect for a web page. And the photos? They are NICE. Check ‘em out.



Free Foto, like Free Digital Photos (above), offers low-res for free, and higher res for a price. But you’ll need to request the price, and wait for a reply. To download a freebie, you need to sign an agreement and give your email address. Every. Time. You. Download. But they do have over 130,000 photos…



The “pd” in PDPhoto stands for “public domain.” There’s not a vast number here, but they’re free…and if you need a pic of Kermit’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they’ve got you covered.



“All pictures on this site are explicitly placed in the public domain, free for any personal or commercial use.” And there’s some very nice photos here, hidden in among the Google ads. Worth a peek.

“HD jpeg files up to 3,000 pixels. Coming soon layered Photoshop files and Vector Art.” Some very nice, professional photos. Stunning, really. A nice portfolio site.



Many of the photos here look like print-quality commercial photographs–they’re that good. A jewel of a site.



Photl is very impressive. All the photos are free, and you can search for them by keyword combined with a color. Need a red dress? Type “dresses” and choose the color red from the picker. Bingo. When you go to download, they have a crop tool that allows you to download just a portion, if you like. Big files, high quality. Downloads limited to 35mb a day. I’m bookmarking this sucker.



RGBStock reminds me of my favorite pay-for-stock site, iStockphoto.com. Same nice pop-ups when you hover over an image, same clean design. Only difference is: RBGstock is free. Gotta love it.

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Click on the screenshot above to see how painting looks in Photoshop CS5.

As we mentioned last week, Adobe’s CS5 kickoff event was April 12. Photoshop CS5 looks very, very promising, and worth the upgrade. Some of the more amazing new features include the Content-aware Fill, which makes short work of removing people from images, and the Puppet Warp, which will let you reposition arms and legs at will, long after the shutter has clicked. Mind-boggling stuff. Of course, the feature I was most interested in was the rumored improvements to the brush engine in Photoshop, which hasn’t been touched since version 7 (five releases ago). We got just a brief look at how the new brushes work. So this post is a gathering of some further information from various sources, to help us figure out just what has changed. And, to answer the Big Question: does it replace Painter?

This may be a point of little interest to most digital painters. After all, Photoshop is already the most commonly-used software for digital painting, by far. Personally, I use Painter much more for painting. Perhaps that’s because I began my art training years ago using traditional materials. For folks like me, Painter is easier to paint with than Photoshop, since the brushes work like their counterparts in the real world, pretty much. Blending colors on the canvas has always been much better in Painter, though far from perfect. From what I understand, the “brush engine” (picture a tiny motor inside a brush handle pumping out paint) in Painter differs from the one in Photoshop in that the brush interacts with the colors already on the canvas. In Photoshop, the brush simply stamps an image repeatedly to give the illusion of a continuous stroke. You can see the difference here:

Yellow and blue make green...sort of. Painter (on the left) does a fair job of mixing colors on the canvas. Photoshop CS3, on the right, is a bunch of blue circle stamps on top of yellow.

With this in mind, I anxiously awaited yesterday’s kickoff, hoping to see that Photoshop had fixed the brush engine, so that it would truly act like paint on canvas. I probably won’t know for sure until I get my hands on the new version and play with it, but for now it’s looking like Adobe has simply enhanced the Smudge tool. The examples (check out the links which follow) that I’ve found show “paintings” that are nothing more than the ol’ smearing-pixels-around school of painting. True, colors do mix on the canvas now. Yellow and blue seem to create green. But Adobe is calling the new brushes “Natural Media Bristle Tip Brushes,” which sounds like throwing down the gauntlet in Corel’s face, to me. Don’t misunderstand me–I think they’ve made some great improvements here. But I don’t think they’ve released the “Painter Killer” yet.

For one thing, there’s no Color Cloning in CS5. As you look at the examples below, keep in mind that all the artist has done is smear pixels around in an existing photograph. Perhaps they’ve added colors, too, but the point is there is no cloning ability. Without that, I can’t see photographers using the new brushes. In Julianne Kost’s presentation (top), she mentions she’s “not an artist” and seems afraid of actual painting. (Too bad they didn’t hire an artist to show off the new product features.) Photographers use Painter’s cloning technology to create painterly images. I can’t see them switching to Photoshop without something similar.

But these are just my opinions. I’d love to hear your reactions to the new release. Please check out the links which follow, if you’d like to see the new brushes in action.

John Derry’s launch-day post

John Derry paints an apple from scratch and as a smudge painting.

Adobe demonstrates the Mixer Brush and the Bristle Tips.

Tim Shelbourne does a nice job of mimicking a traditional oil portrait.

Some nice examples from photographer Thomas Hawk.

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This week we focus on new and exciting products and services for you.

It’s hard to keep up with all the new technology out there. Just when you get comfortable with RealCool 1.0, out comes RealCool 2.0 (also named EvenCooler, just to make things confusing). On April 12, Adobe is releasing the next version of their Creativite Suite, number 5. You can sign up to attend an online kickoff presentation at Adobe.com, or check out this “sneak peek” video, to get an idea of what’s coming in Photoshop CS5. Digital painters will find this post from John Derry especially intriguing. It looks like Photoshop brushes have gotten some substantial tweaks, to say the least.

In addition to a new version of Photoshop, there’s other new stuff out there. Let’s take a look.

Fine Art America on Steroids

A while back, we reviewed an upcoming marketing site for artists, called Fine Art America (see the post here). Fine Art America (FAA) has been offering, for a $30 yearly fee, a print-on-demand (POD) service. Well, now that $30 fee gets you a website, as well, plus a huge number of useful services. This can make your marketing a whole lot simpler, since you can show your work, sell your work (as framed prints or originals), and have your own professional-looking web presence all in one place. For thirty bucks a year! Pretty mind-boggling, I’d say. You can find out more about it here.

Pixelmator for Image Editing

If you’re on a Mac, and you’re on a limited budget, you may want to check out Pixelmator. In fact, even if you’re not on a budget, you may want to give it a look. It’s a gorgeous Mac-ish application, and it plays just fine with the latest OS version, Snow Leopard (OS 10.6, to those of you who prefer numbers to zoo animals). For well under $100 ($59 as of this writing), it’s darn near a Photoshop killer. Depending on how much you use Photoshop, and what you use it for, you may find Pixelmator does all you need. After all, who needs a Cadillac just to drive to the grocery store? For some artists, this won’t be an either-or decision, since there are some nice, unique things about Pixelmator, and you may just find you need both. As with Art Rage, you may find it does all you need, or you may decide it has a place in your workflow alongside Photoshop and Painter. Pixelmator has a free 30 day, full-featured trial, so give it a download and see what you think. Here’s nice short review. Here’s another.

Sumo Paint for Digital Painting

An example of what the new Bump Map filter can do.

Sumo Paint is still a free online program, like Aviary, for editing images and digital painting. It still feels a bit wonky: sliders don’t slide, they jump around erratically, and menu items seem reluctant to cooperate. There is a Sumo Pro version, which runs on your computer, instead of in a browser, and makes use of Adobe Air. That may result in more of a solid app than the online Flash version. There’s a homework assignment for a reader who chooses to take it on. Personally, I don’t see the big advantage to having an app run in a browser. Sure, you can access it from any computer, but how many people need that ability, I wonder. One problem with Flash apps is that they won’t (currently, at least) run on the new iPad. Well, I’m rambling, so time to close for this week. Enjoy!

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John Derry's new training video, available now for download.

Today we’ll take a quick look at some training resources available to you right on your computer. Some of these are free, while others are very reasonably priced. This is by no means a complete list. It’s just the ones I know of that seem worth checking out. If you know of others, please feel free to mention them in the comments. And now it’s time for class!

First off, there’s John Derry’s new 90 minute video called “Portraiture: From Photo to Painting.” For a mere $20, you can learn at the feet of master…well, maybe not at his feet exactly. Derry is one of the “founding fathers” of Painter, and he continues to be actively involved in the community, especially as an instructor. This is a download of the webinar from November 2009. So if you missed it, here’s your chance. This is a beginner’s introduction to using Painter to turn photographs into paintings.

The Digital Art Academy offers a variety of online classes. They combine PDF files along with video tutorials, as well as interaction with the instructor. Instructors include Anne Carter-Hargrove, Marilyn Sholin, Scott Deardorff, Karen Bonaker, Jill Garl, Tim Shelbourne, and Susi Lawson. Prices are very reasonable, especially for training of this quality.

Craig’s Tutorials is a single page of tutorials, some in video format, for beginning Painter. Free.

Imagine FX magazine’s website offers 150 tutorials from past issues of the magazine, all free. There’s a ton of content here. Tutorials consist of PDF files to download along with support files.

LVS (Leader in Virtual Studies) is an online classroom similar in concept to the Digital Art Academy, above. A large range of subjects in addition to digital art are taught here. Courses run from $12 to $30.

Xtrain offers video training in everything from web design to basic drawing to digital photography to digital art. There are some free videos here, as well as paid.

That’s all for this week. Be sure to check out the Resources and Links page for more training resources and lots of other interesting, helpful stuff.

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Art Rage 3 has just been released. (You can read our review of the previous version here.) It now comes in two flavors: Studio ($40) and Studio Pro ($80). Click here for the press release info.

In October, Sumo Paint 2.0 was released. (You can read our review of the previous version here.) In addition to the free online version of this Photoshop-like app, there’s now a downloadable Pro version for $19. This allows you to run Sumo locally on your machine, which should speed up responsiveness.

Rollip sounds like something you’d buy at Ikea, perhaps, but it’s actually a small online application for processing photos with various effects. It’s free, and has a range of Photoshop-like filters.

Photovisi is another free online app that looks like Rollip’s twin brother. As with Rollip, you upload images and process them. Photovisi then creates a neat photo collage for you. You can download it (to use as a screensaver, perhaps). Even cooler, you can print your collage on a variety of products through Zazzle. What a great idea!

Lightwyrm.com is a new digital art gallery and forum. They also offer some Painter and Photoshop tutorials.

Designermart offers some tutorials and resources for creating slick car illustrations, using Photoshop or 3D Studio Max.

This last item is just for fun. Machinarium is one of the best-looking, most well-designed, funniest and cleverest games I’ve ever played. Just check out the free demo and you’ll be hooked. An amazing achievement by a small group of developers and artists in the Czech Republic. $20.

Got something cool you’d like to share? Drop us a line: webmaster at digitalimagemagazine.com

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The new watercolor brushes for Painter by John Derry do a great job duplicating the look and feel of traditional watercolor. Painting by John Derry.

As a long-time traditional watercolorist, I’ve never had much luck with Painter’s watercolor brushes. I just couldn’t get Painter to reproduce that characteristic look of watercolor, such as wet-into-wet, random areas of unpainted white peeking through, “happy accidents,” and so on. So I was very excited when I learned that John Derry (one of the original “founding fathers” of Painter) had developed a new set of watercolor brushes for Painter. Last week, John gave an online demonstration (a “webinar”) of the brushes. He created the painting above as we watched. John will be posting this webinar on his site soon, and I’ll add the link for it here when he does. I found it very helpful to see how the brushes are used.

A close-up showing how well the brushes mimic traditional watercolors.

The new brushes install as a brush category, and there are fourteen variants in the set. Half of these are “gel” brushes, and the other half are digital watercolor variants. It’s easy to tell which are which since the brush names begin with either “Gel” or “Wet.” All the brushes work best on a layer with a blending mode of Gel. This is the secret to how the brushes are able to mimic the translucent, glowing quality of real watercolor. They all work on default blending mode layers, as well, with somewhat different effects. I’d recommend doing a lot of playing at first, just to get a feel for the brushes.

You can use the Wet brushes and the Gel brushes together. Since the Wet brushes are Digital Watercolor, however, you’ll need to dry the watercolor before the Gel brushes will interact with color laid down. To do this, go Layer>Dry Watercolor Layer.

Let’s take a look at how each of the brushes work. The following illustrations and descriptions come from the instructions John Derry provides with the brushes. Thank you, John, for letting me steal your work!

Gel Diffusion (above, right) diffuses color on the current layer. Gel Diffusion is continuous: as long as pressure is applied, diffusion is continuously applied. The longer diffusion is applied to the underlying color, the lighter the diffused area becomes. Layer type: Gel

I’ve just begun exploring what these brushes can do, but already I’m quite impressed. No doubt you’ll find some brushes more to your liking than others. As they say, different strokes for different folks. Some of the brushes are meant to be used occasionally, similar to dabbing with a paper towel, or scratching with a razor blade to reveal whites in traditional watercolor.

You can order John’s Watercolors directly from John Derry on his blog. They are $35USD.

My first painting using John's Watercolors. This looks a lot like my traditional watercolor portraits. Brushes used were Gel Mixer for most, and a touch of Gel Diffuser to lighten areas. Also some Gel Opaque for details.

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