A first brush with PAINTER

Now that everyone has mastered the intricacies of Photoshop (just kidding) we begin learning a new program, Painter. Powerful and more like making art the old fashioned way because of the Wacom tablet, a virtual sketchpad interface.

The selection of artist tools is overwhelming. So here we are at the bottom of another steep learning curve.

Since I couldn't access photos I had on  a flash card due to...anyway, I resorted to real life drawing with the Wacom tablet of a fellow art student. Sketched, painted, erased all on the Wacom. This exercise used the technology in the simplest way; as a replacement for brushes paint and paper, no fancy tricks. 

The eraser feature of the backside of the pen is very expedient, however I kept activating some feature by accident that was turning it into a magnification tool that I couldn't figure how to turn off (very annoying). 

Hold the space bar down then click and move the canvas around, very handy. Ctrl + or -  are the way to enlarge and reduce, there is no navigation window like in PS.

The Wacom tablet isn't large enough to operate some of the long pull down menus so I find myself going back and forth between the tablet for drawing and painting and mostly using the touch pad of the computer for managing tools, operations, and files. It is instinctive to try and use the Wacom tablet like a touch pad, too bad it doesn't work like that.