Experimenting in Corel Painter

I’ve never been one to follow the “workflow” of the software experts, doing so is just likely to produce the same results as most others. I believe creativity comes with learning to use your tools, but in depth and a personal way. There is nothing like just rolling up you sleaves and jumping in and going for it.

I have had painter lite, then painter essentials for a while so I’m familiar with the basic workspace, but I wasn’t prepared for all the different brushes. My first attempt to just try them all one after the other created a confused mess. I did already like the Sargent and Impressionist brushes so I figured I should stat with them and work through some of the brush settings, in clone modes (copy colour, or copy image), dab patterns,  blend/bleed and just straight colour selection from the colour wheel. I had a HDR image of the shadows under a backlit oak that looked promising.

I first made a very rough under painting using a very broad Sargent brush doing just a colour clone to rough in the basic composition and used it in a thinner size to mark in some of the detail. Quick and dirty just to establish the composition.

Then I switched over to the impressionist brush and varied between adding my own colour and using colour cloning. I also concentrated on making sure the direction of my strokes followed the shapes. Also that the direction of light as described by the highlights and shadows were consistent.

Even though this was painted inside on a rainy day. I do think it has a spontaneous  freshes, not as obvious in the original photo (despite it being HDR).