Using the Brush Drawer

One of the joys of using Corel®  Painter™ Essentials 4 is exploring the media in the Brush Drawer. When you find a medium that you like, you can customize it and save it as a favorite brush. By saving the brush in this way, you can find it quickly when you want to reuse it.

The Brush Drawer

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to do the following:

•    choose a brush from the Brush Drawer
•    customize a brush
•    add a brush to the Favorites area
•    remove a brush from the Favorites area

Step 1: Choose a brush from the Brush Drawer

1.    Start Corel Painter Essentials 4, and create a new painting (File menu > New). Choose any page size and resolution you want.
2.    On the left side of the application window, click the Brush Drawer arrow . The Brush Drawer opens.
3.    Click a brush category tab along the top of the brush drawer. To view the names of the categories before you click, hover over the brush category tabs.
  
 
4.    From the list of brushes, click a brush stroke.

Step 2: Customize a brush

1.    Choose a brush from the Brush Drawer.
2.    On the property bar, adjust the settings: Brush Size, Opacity, and Grain.

  Note: The Grain control is available only for brushes that react to the paper grain.

Step 3: Save a favorite brush

1.    Choose the brush that you want to save.
2.    Click the Add Favorites button at the bottom of the Brush Drawer.
 
    An icon for the brush that you are currently using is added to the Favorites area of the Brush Drawer. You can click the brush icon whenever you want to access the brush.

    Note: Whenever you use a brush, the icon for the brush is automatically added to the top of the Recently Used area (above the Favorites area). If you forget to add a brush to the Favorites area, you can look for the brush in the Recently Used area.

Step 4: Remove a brush from the Favorites area

1.    Open the Brush Drawer. (You cannot remove a brush from the Favorites area if the Brush Drawer is closed.)
2.    In the Favorites area, locate the brush icon for the brush that you want to remove, and drag the icon out of the Favorites area.

   
    The plus sign changes to a minus sign, which indicates that you are removing a brush.

Tips

•    You can view the name of the brush that you are currently using by hovering over the Brush Tool icon in the toolbox.
  

•    You can clear all brushes from the Recently Used area and the Favorites area of the Brush Drawer by restoring the factory default settings. To do this, hold down the Shift key when you start the application. In the dialog box that appears, click Yes to confirm that you want to restore the factory default settings.