Playing with Painter 11

I was poking around and stumbled upon the trial version of Corel Painter 11. It's apparently capable of epicness, but unfortunately, I lack the mad art skills to test this out fully. Still, a potential adventure was awaiting, so I decided to mess around with the program. At first glance, it looks a lot like Photoshop, minus your photo editing features. Instead, you can find a smattering of what you'd expecting from a painting program--oil pastels, acrylic paints, watercolor, liquid ink, and many more. There's also this handy color mixer palette in which you can actually dab on paints and mix them around. Fancy!

So yeah, mouse = hard.

Playing around with a face. I realize the eye is all wrong, as are many other things, but hey, I'm no artist. =D You can also see some of the fancy features in Painter here.

Honestly speaking, I barely knew what half of the settings were for each brush tool, so I just played around a bit with my mouse. You can do much more with a tablet in terms of pressure, tilt, and whatnot, but I don't have one. I had no idea which brushes would suit my needs best either, so it was pretty much trial and error all the way through. The program crashed several times throughout my short adventure (good thing there's a recovery folder for salvaged work), but otherwise, I had a good time. All-in-all, the basics to Painter are intuitive and fairly easy to figure out if you've ever used Photoshop before. Of course, there are many other features and settings that I haven't yet figured out or discovered, but that's for another date and time! And as expected from the name, this program is better for creating paintings than Photoshop is (though some apparently still prefer Photoshop).

I wear war paint on weekends and non-religious holidays. Of course, I still count Christmas as non-religious, and no, 2938402384 people and I did not just steal a holiday.

Hey, look! I added color! Except I cheated and did it in Photoshop.

Adventure concluded. I'm still looking at some other people's work with a smidge of envy.

Also, I am enjoying the wee hours of the morning a bit too much. Still, my screwy sleep schedule has never been much of a surprise. This reminds me: CLOCK AND BMAL1--WE'RE NOT JUST HOMIES WITH THE SUN! I did a presentation with a friend on the regulatory role of the CLOCK/BMAL1 transcription factor complex in the circadian molecular oscillator as well as the roles of RACK1 and pka-alpha. Of course, I don't remember the details, but I do remember names and the little motto/saying we came up with! Unfortunately, this research project--and the allure of the products of modern technology--aren't helping me sleep at normal times. I clearly need to set an alarm for midnight and have that trigger the release of sleeping gas into the surrounding environment. OR I could go to bed at increasingly offensive hours of the day until I finally wake up to a syrup-less waffle breakfast at 10am.