Thanks to Corel's Painter 11, I may finally allow my wife to use my brushes.

I don't let my wife touch my paint brushes. Doesn't matter if they are art brushes or house painting brushes. In fact, I hide my brushes from her because I learned early on that she will not clean them properly when she's finished. Don't get me wrong. My wife is not a slob, but cleaning brushes falls somewhere between dusting light bulbs and collecting tax receipts on her list of priorities. To her, brushes are like paper towels. Use once and discard. If she MUST paint something, I get her those foam rubber ones that come 10 for $2.00.

For me, there is something hypnotic about applying paint with a good brush. The viscosity of the paint... the vibrancy of fresh pigment... the smell of the oil. The act of applying paint is where Painter 11 really shines. OK, maybe not the smell so much. But Painter 11 is as close to actually slapping paint on a canvas as it gets. Let's get started...

We'll begin with this is a photo I took of our pup, Penny. You
can start from scratch if you want, but for this review I'll show
off Painter 11's cloning features.

The brush selection and controls are wide and varied. There are similarities to painting in Photoshop, but Painter 11
allows much more flexibility and texture in the way it applies color. In this screen shot, I am using cloning brushes
which automatically pulls colors from the photograph. I first used a large soft brush with a heavy canvas texture to
lay in the soft background. I then started laying in some details on Penny's face with an oil cloner brush.

Here's a detail of the texture the oil cloner lays in with a 14 pixel brush. Painter 11 allows for brush direction to sense
which way you are dragging the brush. This gives very detailed and realistic texture to each stroke.

This shot shows the appeal of Painter 11's brush texture feature. For Penny's head I mostly stroked in the direction
her hair grows, but I threw in a few odd strokes to better demonstrate the brush effects.

In this panel  I've intentionally made a mess of the mouth by using long strokes with a brush that is too big to
show the detail that I want to bring out.

In actual painting, to get finer detail, I use a smaller brush. To fix Penny's mouth I reduced the brush size to
6 pixels and used short strokes to bring back some detail. I also used the small brush to sharpen the detail
of the eyes.

Here I started laying in some of the grass around Penny. Note the heavy texture of the strokes.

One more close-up to show off the brush strokes. I swear I thought I could smell linseed oil while I was doing this.

Here is the painting about half done. I have a lot of experience with Photoshop, but this is really my first attempt
with Corel painter. Admittedly, it still needs some work, but for a first try I'm pretty pleased with it.

If I had to mention any issues with the application it would be with the Help feature. At one point I just wanted to make a copy of the canvas layer and never could figure it out. Help advised, "highlight the layer, hold down ALT and click the layer." This does not work for the Canvas layer. I'm sure there is a simple way to do this, but the Help menu was no help.

In all, Painter 11 is an excellent app for recreating realistic paint effects and I highly recommend it for anyone with a modicum of artistic ability. Don't like oil paint? How about colored pencils, watercolors (dry or wet), conte crayons, charcoal, pencil? These are just a few of the other media available in Painter 11.

Excuse me a sec...
Hey honey! Come see these new paint brushes... don't be silly, of course you can use them... I bought 'em just for you.

Enjoy!