Digital Painting with Corel Painter and Wacom Tablets

This past weekend, I worked in two trade shows managing the Wacom booth. If you don’t know, Wacom makes those fantastic drawing tablets that replace the functions of a computer mouse. You have much more control using the supplied pen on the tablet to draw instead of the crude movements of a mouse which utilize your whole arm. For the last few years, they’ve also manufactured the Cintiq tablet which offers you the same ability to draw with a special pen but now you actually work right on a tablet that is comprised of a high-end computer monitor. You see the artwork right under your pen. It is as close to working on a traditional canvas as you can get. Several people who visited our booth in Banff could see the potential working with children on the Cintiq. It’s so spontaneous and creative.
 

In the second trade show, we teamed up with the Corel Corporation who produce a software package called Painter 11. This is such a unique tool to create freehand art or to use a photograph as the base of your art piece and you can apply a multitude of brush styles; the sky is the limit. The program is so sophisticated, you can choose whether you’d prefer to draw in chalk, pastels, oil, watercolor, etc. and then you choose the type of brush, bristle, spread, paper choice, texture and type of blending characteristics you want to apply. It takes awhile to grasp all the features of this software but when you combine it with the Wacom tablets, it takes you to another level. Having the opportunity to work with the Corel Painter representative who came direct from head office to attend this trade show, I kick-started my enthusiasm for this new art form. I’m a photographer, not a painter. I have never attempted to dabble with paints, canvas and the rest of the paraphernalia. But now I can use my photographs as a guide and use these new digital paints to create another art form. The great feature about this is that if I make a mistake, I can back up a couple of steps and try again until I get it to a point where I’m satisfied.
 

I also picked up a Wacom Art pen which simulates a wide brush that has bristles cut at an angle. The results are very cool too. The only problem I can foresee is that I don’t know when I’ll have time left to sleep. I have about forty years of photographic images that I need to try to transform into another art form. As I become more proficient at it, I’m sure I’ll be able to see whether or not there is any potential in an image before I get too carried away with it. It’s certainly been great fun so far. If you want to see how creative one could get with this technology, check out www.jeremysutton.com . He’s been using this for years and is truly an artist.
Until next month,