Better brushstrokes with the Enhanced Brush Ghost
By Lori Kerfoot
The Enhanced Brush Ghost gives you unprecedented visual feedback as you apply brushstrokes with a pen tablet in Corel® Painter™ X. This feedback gives you better control over your brushstrokes.
Figure 1: The example above captures the Enhanced Brush Ghost at three different points along a brushstroke.
The Enhanced Brush Ghost is essentially an extension of the drawing cursor. When you choose a brush variant in Corel Painter and place your pen on the tablet, the brush ghost appears. In previous versions of Corel Painter, the brush ghost showed you the approximate size and shape of the brush but disappeared when you applied a brushstroke.
The Enhanced Brush Ghost in Corel Painter X remains on-screen as you draw and paint. It consists of three parts that not only show you the size and general shape of the brush, but also provide you with information about the tilt, rotation, and paint flow, depending on the type of pen you use.
Figure 2: The appearance of the Enhanced Brush Ghost (below each pen) changes depending on the pen you use. The three example pens are from Wacom®: Intuos 3® Grip Pen (left), Intuos3 6D Art Pen (center), Intuos3 Airbrush (right).
Components of the Enhanced Brush Ghost
The outer ring shows you the maximum brush width. It can be round or elliptical, depending on the shape of the brush. For example, brushes with a Squeeze setting of less than 100% appear elliptical. To view the Squeeze setting for a brush, click Window > Brush Controls > Show Angle.
The line represents the tilt and direction (bearing) of the pen. It shows you where the center of the brush is relative to the maximum brush size, so you can gauge the exact location of the brush tip (where the brush starts painting when you apply pressure). The length of the stick changes, depending on the tilt: the more you tilt the pen, the longer the stick becomes. If you are using an airbrush pen, the end of the stick becomes wider as you increase the paint flow with the fingerwheel.
If you have a flat-tipped pen that supports 360-degree rotation, a dot appears on the outer ring to indicate the rotation of the pen. The Art Pens brush category on the Brush Selector bar contains brush variants that are optimized for these types of pens.
Although the benefits of the Enhanced Brush Ghost are many, you can turn it off, or use the legacy brush ghost, if you want to increase the speed with which brushstrokes are applied.
To turn brush ghosting on or off
- Do one of the following:
- (Mac® OS) Choose Corel Painter X menu > Preferences > General.
- (Windows®) Choose Edit menu > Preferences > General.
- In the Drawing Cursor area of the dialog box, click the Enable Brush Ghosting check box to enable or disable basic brush ghosting.
- Click the Enhanced Brush Ghost check box to enable or disable the Enhanced Brush Ghost.
Figure 3: You can turn brush ghosting on or off from the General page of the Preferences dialog box.