Let's Draw

• If you need to, reset Painter
  • Hold down the shift key while launching
• First things first: Brush Tracking
• Open Painter
• Choose Mac: Menu > Corel Painter 11 > Preferences
• Choose Win: Menu > Edit > Preferences
• Choose Brush Tracking
• Do a few practice strokes at average pressure and average speed

• Menu > File > New...
• Width: 1200px
• Height: 1200px (or visa versa)
• Resolution: 150ppi
• Paper Color: Middle gray
• 

• Choose charcoal brush, first variation, set it to black
• Add a new layer in the Layers panel

• 3 1-minute
• 1 5-minute

About Bitmaps

• Painter paints pictures in a "bitmap" format.
• A bitmap is a map of bits, the bits, in this case, are pixels
• Originally, bits meant a bit of data (1 or 0)
• Each blob of paint on the canvas is fixed to a "pixel"
• Zooming in on a single pixel:
  
  
  
  
  
• The number of pixels on the screen are theoretically 72 per inch (72ppi)
• However, you can set the ppi of the image to anything you want.
• A 1200 pixel by 1500 pixel image at 150ppi will print at 8 x 10 inches ( 1200/150 = 8 and 1500/150 = 10 )
• 150ppi is recommended by many fine-art print shops as minimum ppi. 200ppi is a bit better, 360ppi is best. High-end gicleé (zhee-clay) printers use between 180 and 360ppi. (reference)
• If in doubt, ask your printer. If printing yourself, read your printer's manual.
• Here's a typical Gicleé printer's FAQ page

Bitmaps come in different formats

Open formats (Source image)

• jpg
• "Joint Photographic Experts Group"
• Lossey compression (that is, is looses data about the image)
• A low compression, high quality jpg, 80K file size
  
• A high compression, low quality jpg,1K file size
  
• png
• "Portable Network Graphics"
• Lossless compression (that is, it doesn't loose any data or quality)
• Supports transparency
• Created as an open standard to get rid of potential licensing requirements for proprietary formats
• A png, 106K
  
• tiff
• "Tagged Image File Format"
• Lossless
• Owned by Adobe Corp.
• Used a lot in Printing industry
• Not supported by browsers, but we can download it (253K)
• pict
• "Picture"
• Lossless
• Originated with Apple Macs
• Deprecated (declared by Apple as obsolete, but still supported) for .png
• Not supported by browsers, but we can download it (361K)
• gif
• "Graphics Interchange Format"
• Pronounced "jif," like in "jiffy" peanut butter (source)
• Kind of lossless, but looses color information on each individual pixel, reducing the possible number of colors from millions to 256 possible colors
• Once owned by CompuServe, but went into public domain in 2004
• A gif, 27K
  
• Zoomed in gif to show banding
  
• bmp (rare these days)
• Bitmap Image Format
• Windows-only format
• Not supported by browsers, but we can download it (270K)

Proprietary formats

• riff (Resource Interchange File Format)
  • Corel Painter's native format
  • Not supported by anybody else
• psd (photoshop document)
  • Photoshop's native format
  • Widely, but only partially, supported by Painter, Illustrator, Flash and others
• tga (Targa)
  • Truevision Targa hardware graphics board, still used by 3D community

Painter

Screen Management Shortcuts (Painter Wow page 13)

• DRAG CANVAS
  Hold spacebar, move mouse without clicking, then drag to move canvas. Careful with this, however, it's flaky. Best practice is to hold the space bar, move the stylus without pressing down, then press down to drag the canvas.
• ROTATE CANVAS
  Hold Option/Alt spacebar drag to rotate canvas around center of window
• RESET ROTATION
  Option/Alt spacebar click-once to return to un-rotated view
• ZOOM IN
  Command/Control spacebar click to zoom into canvas
• ZOOM OUT
  Option/Alt Command/Control spacebar click to zoom out
• TOGGLE FULLSCREEN
  Command/Control M to view whole screen as the canvas (instead of in a window)

Other UI Features Worth Noting

• Command/Control-M to set workspace to full screen (not sure of effect in Windows)
• Brush Menu: upper right popup menu: Category Display > Categories as List
  
• Tab to hide UI
• Shift-Tab to hide just the Panels

Content Selectors - More Later this semester

Papers

Gradients

Patterns

Weaves

Nozzles & Image Hose

Brush Looks

A Word of Warning

While many of the Content Selectors create cool looking stuff, avoid using them for their own sake. If you do, you'll be a victim of the "Photoshop Effect" – the gratuitous use of digital effects for no more reason than they're in the software.

Sketching with pencils

Source Files: Pencil_Sketches rifs, (zipped)

• Set brush tracing first
• New Doc
• 1500 wide by 1200 high by 150ppi
• Use Pencil: 2B Variant
• Select a dark gray (H:0, S:0, V:75)
• Uncheck the Painter Colors from the popup menu in the upper left of the Color Sets panel
• Now comes the buggy part. These steps may or may not work. The workaround is to change the size of the Color Set Library View. Sometimes it will add the current color, sometimes it will add yellow, but then it will start to work as expected (we hope).
• Panel-menu: New Empty Color Set
• Panel-button: Add Color To Color Set

Set to Clone'm If You Got'm

Cloning allows you to trace from an image

My image:

[eyekon.png]

Open Menu > Window > Clone Source

Click on the little disk (who uses disks anymore?) icon

Choose your image from the file dialog

Click on the tracing icon to turn the image on:

Note to users of earlier versions of painter: Use Menu > File > Clone Source and toggle the tracing at the side of the window

Note that this panel loves to disappear. Command/Control 6 brings it back.

Start by making a loose sketch that shows the basic forms and their position on the paper

Zipped source .rif's

Source Image

Build up with light strokes (01_pencil_loosesketch.rif)

Add in middle values (02_pencil_midtones.rif)

Add in background (03_pencil_background.rif)

Add in details (04_pencil_details.rif)

Finalize with eraser details (05_pencil_eraserdetails.rif)

A variation with Round Blender brush

Handy (poorly documented) Tip

Shift-Drag to pull a brush off the Brushes menu and create a custom Panel of brushes

Be forewarned: Painter will crash, save often

Two Color Conté Crayon

Painter Zipped Source riff's

1500x1200 Pitcher to Clone (right click to download)

• Open the jpg
• Grab with the eyedropper the midtone, highlight, and dark colors and store them in a color set
• Write down the RGB values of the midtone (175, 168, 142)
• Open new painter file, 640 x480 150ppi
• Set paper color to captured midtone
• Open the Clone Source Panel and set the clone source to the jpg
• Choose Charcoal & Conté: Real Soft Conté variant
• Set brush size to around 8
• Work up darks
• Work up lights
• Use Blender: Soft Blender Stump
• Come back in at the end to make spectral highlights with cool white

Continue working on: Assignment 1: Dry Media