The brush transposer makes is a fun and easy way to create your own custom brushes.

Not only does Corel Painter come loaded with hundreds of brushes right out of the box, but it also allows you to create your own brushes from scratch, or modify the default brushes. With so many brushes to pick from, you may wonder why anyone would want to create even more! Well, today we’re going to look at how you can use the Transposer to combine two of your favorite brushes to create a third, brand new brush, with just a few clicks.

Within the Brush Creator (access with CMD+B/CTL+B), there are three tools: the Stroke Designer, the Randomizer, and the Transposer. Here’s a quick summary of each:

• Stroke Designer - this is where you go to either tweak an existing brush (and then save it as new variant), or create a new brush from scratch. A very powerful and complex tool, with many variables to play with.
• Randomizer - this lets you click a button and get (you guessed it) 12 new randomly-generated brushes. Click on the gears (shown in the red circle here) to randomize.
  

  The Randomizer tool in the Brush Creator

• Transposer - this is the tool we’ll look at today. Choose two brushes, click the gears, and Painter will generate a series of five new brushes. Read on for more info.

How the Transposer Works

Five variations ranging from Captured Bristle to Grainy Water.

Think of the Transposer as a blender: it will blend the qualities of two brushes together, creating five variations when you click the gears. Use the drop-down to select the top brush, just as you normally do in the toolbar. Do the same for the bottom brush. Click the gear icon. Painter generates five variations, with the first having just a little of the bottom brush’s qualities, but mostly the top brush’s qualities. As you move down the variations, the bottom brush’s qualities become more prevalent. This is pretty easy to understand, and use. But there are a few gotchas to watch out for.

Gotchas

Here’s where things can get confusing and downright frustrating. Say you choose two brush types to transpose, like the Furry Brush variant of the F-X category on top, and the Captured Bristle variant of the Acrylics category on the bottom. You click on the transpose button (the gears). Now, you select one of the five variations just generated, by clicking on it. You paint with it in the preview area, to see how it looks. What you may not realize is you have REPLACED the top brush settings when you selected the variation. If you were to click on the transpose button again, you’d get a set of five variations starting with the variation you had picked last! And it’s not at all obvious that this has happened, since the top brush still says “Furry Brush.” This is consistent with how Painter works, but it’s a potential landmine for newbies. If you want to start again with the Furry Brush default variant (the original settings), you need to point your mouse to the top menu, and go Variant > Restore Default Variant.

Saving Your New Brush

Once you’ve found a cool variation and decide to keep it, you’ll need to save it. To do so, go to the top menu, select Variant, and then Save Variant. You’ll get a dialog box, where you type in a new name. Here’s another gotcha to watch for: Painter puts the name of the top brush into the dialog box for you. If you accept it and click OK, you will LOSE the default variant. Painter does not warn you, it just lets you overlay the existing brush variant. So, be very careful and make sure you create a new name when saving your variants. When you save your variant, by the way, it gets added to the top brush’s category.

Ideas for Brushes

Now that we’ve gotten the gotchas out of the way, I want to point out that this is a very fun tool, and a great way to get your toes wet with the Brush Creator, as is the Randomizer. Try mixing the Watercolor brushes with Pastels, or Oils with F-X. Go crazy! You never know what you’ll come up with.
TIP: for a useful skintone brush, try transposing with Captured Bristle on top, and Grainy Water on the bottom. This gives you a good blending brush for cheeks and other transition areas. Give it a try.

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