Apple Mac
AI and a wealth of creative tools help you to make digital art that’s as good as the real thing.
Corel’s graphics applications were among the first to ever become available to users with personal computers. Several decades on, Painter 2021 represents the latest evolution of what it is possible to achieve in digital art without ever going near a real paintbrush.
A powerful package with a dizzying array of tools and options, Painter rewards skill, like any professional creative software, but is also accessible for less experienced users to experiment and learn to create. At its heart is a configurable canvas into which you draw content using a massive selection of over 900 brushes, each with its own settings and, if required, a number of types of layers. These layers – watercolour, liquid or thick paint, have their own tools and properties and can be used together to create art that might be near impossible when using real materials.
Brush bounty
The selection of brushes is vast and covers practically any eventuality. Particularly impressive are the new thick paint brushes, which simulate the application of various sizes and weights of knife and brush with uncanny accuracy. Strokes are thick and goopy, and painting over existing strokes with other colours causes the paint to blend and swirl as it would in real life. All this can be precisely controlled of course, with bleed, opacity, wetness and many other parameters able to be set easily. As with other brushes, right-clicking lets you quickly choose a new brush type, and the colour/layer palette floats helpfully to one side, even suggesting complementary colours as you go.
Photoshop-style tools are also available including cloning, magic wand, extensive selection tools, gradients, paint buckets and more. Powerful guide options can help you compose an image, and there are special modes including mirror and kaleidoscope painting
which duplicate brush strokes, making it easy to create complex patterns with minimal effort.
Mac support has been expanded in this latest version and as well as the usual graphics tablet support, you now get support for Sidecar. With painter’s screen mirrored to an iPad, you can use an Apple Pencil to draw on the tablet’s screen and this also now includes tilt support for brushing. There’s also now Touch Bar support for compatible MacBook Pros, displaying context-sensitive controls as you change tools. In use, this is actually a great help to workflow. Finally, enhanced trackpad support brings more multitouch gestures to the Mac.
Convert and control
Corel has added artificial intelligence support to Painter and here it’s utilised for ‘photo painting’ – converting photographs (or indeed other kinds of images) to artworks. Call up the relevant control panel and you can select from 12 AI styles (landscape, portrait, and so on) and then a selection of styles (impressionist, abstract and more) to have Painter analyse and convert the image.
Naturally, there are a whole bunch of controls to go along with this that determine strokes, detail and all manner of parameters and every time you change one, your Mac has to recalculate the new image but this isn’t too arduous. You’ll probably want to do some fine-tuning of the settings to suit your picture but overall it works very well and can provide some excellent conversions. One other new feature is clone tinting, which enables you to clone areas of a canvas but using custom colours. So you can use shape and texture but apply a new colour to the cloned areas.
Painter 2021 is a comprehensive and powerful painting suite that takes advantage of the latest Mac hardware and OS. It has an incredible selection of brushes and the Thick Paint workflow is remarkable. There is a learning curve but it is less steep than you initially expect, and it’s quite possible for less experienced users to get a lot out of it. That said, Painter really comes into its own when used by a skilled artist. The gallery material online shows just what can be done by those who know their craft.
An excellent digital painting application with features for everyone from beginners to pros.