

Painting with 2.5D texture brushes builds up textures on the painted canvas.

Artists can enhance additional visual interest with directional lighting. Painter’s 2.5D brushes can apply textures, scales, cracks, and other imperfections to a surface. While the previous version of Painter featured texture painting, Painter 2018 tweaks the feature to include even more dynamic Texture or 2.5D brushes in the Texture Cover and Texture Source Blending brush categories. The new Technique button loads four kinds of brush thickness presets for additional control over how much paper texture to reveal. A new pulldown menu lets you choose a specific painting technique like Thick, Dry, Soft, and Thin to vary how the brush interacts with the canvas. A Bleed setting lets you easily smear and blend colors around the canvas. The new Thick Paint brush delivers loaded brush smears on all kinds of papers.Ī choice of paper textures lets you immediately view brush effects on your painting and adjust the amount of paint loaded onto a brush. This gives the aura of real brushes on canvas or painting in a sun-filled studio or in the middle of a lush landscape. The brushes deliver smooth, satisfyingly deep, thick strokes with varying color and volume that encourage experimentation with shadows, lighting, and transparency. That functionality especially benefits Painter’s new headliner Thick Paint brushes, which offer the visceral sensibility of loading thick oil and other paints onto a canvas and arranging or mixing them with bristle brushes and palette knives-or piling on the paint so you can scrape it off. While you can use Painter with a mouse, most digital artists are creating with a pen tablet (like ones from Wacom) to achieve the natural look and feel of pressure sensitive tilt and rotation brush strokes. From its better photo art and composite capabilities, new clone-source options, updated interface, and distinctive texture synthesis, Painter 2018 expands and intensifies artistic potential for almost all users.
