Clearing the Canvas/Layer During Brush Development
November 2nd, 2006 by brush
Personally, I rarely use the Brush Creator dialogue when developing new Painter brushes, preferring to create a new 800 x 800 pixel document to use as my test pad. I then show the Brush Controls palettes from the Window menu and start experimenting.
Although my canvas occupies a large portion of the screen, it soon becomes covered in brush strokes, as I tend to work quickly before fine tuning the stroke parameters. To repeatedly clear the canvas/layer during the development process, you could Select All> Backspace/Delete, but even using the Select All keyboard shortcut (Command/Ctrl+A), this is somewhat long winded.
Here are a couple of methods you could adopt to quickly clear the canvas/layer imagery. The first method would be to use a Clear command button integrated in a custom palette via. The Window menu> Custom palette> Add Command dialogue. To make this a one click operation, have the canvas in a permanently selected state (Select All).
The second method utilises a macro script, also ran via. a custom palette. This script performs the Select All> Edit Clear> Select None operations in a single click. An advantage of the script method is that there are no distracting marching ants around the canvas perimeter during brush testing. If you wish to try out my Quick Clear script, it is available for download, with full instructions included in the download folder;
QuickClear_PC.zip (12 KB) for PC platform.
QuickClear_Mac.dmg.gz (8 KB) for Mac Platform.
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