Brush Shapes in Corel Painter X

Making sense of those strange shapes in the Brush Size palette

January 2009

by Jeremy Sutton

Those often ignored strange shapes, known as "profiles", to the right of the brush size preview in the Brush Controls > Size palette control the way the brush distributes ink as it makes a brush stroke. The different shapes can sometimes give a dramatic change in brush stroke appearance, as is the case with the Pastels > Round Hard Pastel 40 shown above. If you experiment with these shapes and wish to return to the factory default just click on the Variant Reset button which is the brush icon in the very left of the Brush Property Bar.

Not all brush variants can utilize the lower six brush shapes. The Pastels do not. The RealBristle Brushes do.

Here's the effect of all twelve brush shapes on the RealBristle Brushes > Real Oils Short. Note how the spikey shapes (the Pointed and Flat Rake Profiles on the middle and right of the second row from the bottom) result in a nice spikey tail.

Here are two examples of brush shape settings that I quite like. The multi-colored brush strokes are obtained using the Multi-Color Sampler in the Mixer (which works with RealBristle brushes and a few other categories).

I encourage you to experiment and have fun with these options....

Happy Painting!

Jeremy

PS Thanks to Winifred whose question about these profiles led me to create this short article.

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