BrushTalk

Here’s an interesting variant I’ve developed for Painter 7 upwards, which is effectively a dual purpose brush. At default settings, whatever texture you see in the Paper Preview window of the Papers palette is exactly how the stroke will look when painted. This assumes that both the Directional Grain and Invert Paper buttons have not been activated. By subsequently clicking the Invert Paper button in the Papers palette, the original light areas will become dark, and the dark areas will become light.

Directional Grain, especially when used in conjunction with this variant and a high contrast paper will produce a three dimensional texture, with shadow placement dependent upon the brush stroke direction.

With Directional Grain selected, and at default settings for the variant, the original white areas in the paper texture will appear as grey in the brush stroke. This can be changed however by selecting a light color shade for the main color before the stroke is made.

If you wish to try out this variant (for Painter 7 and up), click the download link below;

custom_var_1.zip (4 KB).

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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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If you have not used Smart Folders in Mac Tiger, then I can recommend taking a look. Just select New Smart Folder from the Finder File menu and explore the possibilities.

Knowing first hand how difficult it is to keep tabs on the properties and other info. relating to specific brush variants, I came up with a system using a saved Smart Folder to search for Spotlight Comments pre-assigned to individual variant xml files via. the Get Info dialogue (alternatively use the Automator workflow described here). For search purposes, each individual comment is separated using the pipe symbol (no spaces) as shown in the above screenshot.

A Smart Folder was then created to search for multiple spotlight comments (also shown in the above screenshot). You can use one or more of the comment search fields in the finder, and incorporating the pipe symbol along with the search term forces exact string searches (not case sensitive). The multiple search fields act as an AND gate, meaning all individual comment search matches must be true to return a result.

To aid memory (mine), I also created a Brush Comments Key list as a text file, and assigned an xml file extension. By assigning every possible comment used with the variant files in the comments for this file, it shows up in the searches (for double click access in BBEdit).

In my example the comments/abbreviations used are as follows;

|d| (a default variant).
|acrylics| (Acrylics default brush category).
|7.0| (Brush definition number (the variant was saved in Painter 7).
|brush loading| (Brush Loading= checked).
|adsc| (Auto-Dab short cut supported).

The system can easily be used to generate lists of variants sharing the same search criteria. To save the search results as a text file, Command+A to select all in the Finder results window. Command +C to copy the results to the clipboard, then Command+V to paste into a text document.