Digital Prints

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Mastering Digital Printing
Painter
Corel Painter is a digital painting program that simulates traditional media. With 30 mediums
and more than 400 new brushes in Painter 8, this is the premier “natural-media,”
digital painting and sketching tool. It’s a complex program that is a little daunting for
some, but the results are pretty amazing if you hang in there long enough to explore it.
You can create images from scratch, or you can enhance what you already have, and Painter
is completely compatible with Photoshop so you can exchange layers between the two.
Digital artist Bobbi Doyle-Maher, for example, moves between Painter and Photoshop as
she develops her photo-based and layered images (see Figure 3.15). “One of the big advantages
of working digitally is the ability to accomplish layering with great speed. I compare
digital layering with the glazing that the Old Masters did with paint. To gain the luminous
look and depth of many of the paintings we admire today, the artist started with a tonal
underpainting, followed by glazes of color, then waited for the glazes to dry before they could
proceed. A similar process can be done with a computer, and the results are exciting indeed!”
Other Paint Programs
There are many other digital drawing and painting programs that artists use. A few of
the most popular:
Studio Artist: Synthetik Software’s Studio Artist isn’t as well know as Painter, but those
who use it love it. Based on the idea of a music synthesizer, it’s a “graphic synthesizer” with
an unusual interface, and one of its great strengths is in letting you take an existing source
image and going wild with it. The number of editable controls is astounding, which makes
it an experimenter’s dream. There are also plenty of brushes and textures for straight digital
painting, plus added functions for video processing, morphing, warp animation, and
even “intelligent-assisted (auto) painting.” One common complaint about images processed
in Photoshop is that the various “Photoshop effects” from common filters and plug-ins
become obvious and hackneyed. Studio Artist’s approach helps to avoid this problem.
Figure 3.15 Below: Bobbi Doyle-
Maher used Painter’s Mixer palette to
paint highlights on the backs of the
cows. Above: The final digitally painted
and layered Homestead image.
Courtesy of Bobbi Doyle-Maher/
www.rabbittwilight.com