Q. Hi David, how long have you been using Painter™?

A. I first purchased Painter™ 6 in a can when it was owned by Metacreations. Since then I have upgraded as new versions became available and watched the evolution with great interest. So I guess I have been using Painter™ for about seven years now.

Q. Are you a professional artist?

A. No, sadly I am in the hobbyist/experimenter category. My day job is actually as a store-man at an engineering company.

Q. What aspects of Painter™ most interest you?

A. In general, I think Painter's depth and diversity appeals to my experimenter side. It seems that no matter how many hours one spends with the application, there are always new areas to explore.

Through the internet, I discovered that Painter™ has online communities of users, and it wasn't long before I started building and converting custom brush libraries to share online with other artists. More recently I have been exploring Painter's scripting capabilities.

Q. What are your favourite brushes?

A. I'm a big fan of brush variants which reveal paper texture in their stroke. Impasto and Drip Method variants are also among my favourites. Painter's brush controls afford the artist an incredible degree of customization, which I take full advantage of.

Q. Do you have any tips for users wishing to create their own custom brush variants?

A. Learning and predicting how the various brush setting options will effect the brush stoke comes with many hours of experimentation. It is down to individual choice, but when developing custom variants, I prefer to use the Brush Controls palettes from the Window menu (rather than the Brush Creator dialogue) in conjunction with a large, normally blank white canvas on which to test the modified strokes.

During development, I will either tweak specific settings based on prior knowledge and experience (the prediction method), or maximise some of the individual control settings and observe what effect that has on the brush stroke. If I then stumble upon a stroke characteristic which is visually appealing, fine tuning of the setting(s) which most effect that characteristic is performed prior to saving; the mad professor method.

Q. What are your thoughts on automated/clone painting and filters, surely this is cheating and cheapening art?

A. Ah, the debate goes on, just as it does/did on the traditional versus digital front. Initially I thought as you do, but now I am adopting a more open minded approach to this question. As a hobbyist with limited time to spare, I do appreciate the time and labour saving aspect of what may be regarded as 'less skilful' methods of producing art, whilst at the same time I accept that from a personal stance, whilst there is no deep feeling of guilt on my part, there is a definite void (but not total absence) from fulfilment, coupled with a genuine admiration and appreciation of gifted and talented artists past, present, digital and traditional.

From a commercial viewpoint, I can understand that an artist may have to justify the selling price of an art work, and that justification may be less convincing if there is a perception by the client that neither time nor skill were given to the creation process. But then if the client genuinely believed that, wouldn't they be churning out their own 'creations' rather than calling on the services of the professional?

Thanks David, and I hope we will be seeing more of your paintings in the future.

Thank you, I'll make a special effort.

I painted this Sun Conure in Painter™ 6 as a challenge on one of the In Depth Arts forums. The original reference photograph was kindly loaned by the award-winning photographer Theresa HusariK, and can be viewed in Theresa's wildlife gallery.

Reflecting back to your last question, I did not want to simply clone or trace the original, but instead disciplined myself to a visual reference only.

Rather than press buttons, the process forced me to look and paint what I saw. Although this painting took many hours to complete, there was a strong sense of personal achievement at the end of it, which I would not have felt with a straight cloning, filtered or automated process.

What I would love to be able to do is visualise an image in my mind and then faithfully reproduce that image on canvas... that would be awesome.