Corel Painter 2018
The art app that just keeps getting better. $429 (CURRENTLY ON SALE FOR $385) | PAINTERARTIST.COM
This release of Painter has many new features that will make the digital artist in you quiver in anticipation. The Thick Paint option is a set of painting tools beyond the Impasto ones that were present in earlier versions, accurately mimicking the look and feel of traditional oil and acrylic paint. You can pile on the paint, push it around, scrape the paint, and realistically blend it.
Elsewhere, you can now paint using Texture Cover, Texture Source Blending or the new 2.5D Texture Brushes, which enable you to change, scale or transform the texture at any time. Another new feature, Texture Synthesis, lets you to pick an area of a document or texture and reproduce it at a larger scale. When synthesising a new texture, the selected area of the original one is randomised across the new document, creating something unique. You’re not limited to using textures either: the brushstrokes in a document enable you to create a new texture. The resulting image can be used as any other texture, or as a layer in your painting.
There are a number of smaller yet welcome new features, too. The Enhanced Drip and Liquid brushes work on an empty layer to blend a colour with an oil paint-like transparency, or to paint using colours from underlying layers. Random Grain Rotation will rotate the active paper texture with each brush stroke, giving a natural look. There’s also a redesigned Natural Brush library, and you can create your own selection brushes using any dab-based brush variant. Finally, new cloning capabilities give you the ability to adjust the size and shape of clone sources.
There have also been a number of background and interface tweaks, making the software easier to use. Overall, Corel has done well in updating Painter so that, more than ever, it brings the worlds of traditional and digital art closer together. Painter 2018 sports great new additions to refine your digital painting experience.
Don Seegmiller