Painter 2016 Dynamic Speckles is an exciting new addition that enhances the artist expressive range.
As a natural media emulating application, Painter has long sought to mimic the individual hairs found within a traditional brush stroke.
This is accomplished via both the various brush engines and brush tips or dab types contained within Painter.
The dynamic speckle bend is Painters new generation of dab type to tackle this task of both generating and managing a bundle
of individual points which in turn can mimic brush hairs but it goes far beyond the traditional as we will see.
We are going to begin by taking a look at a simple speckle brush and then we complexify it by making some adjustments to it.
I do want to mention I’ve got a bit of clutter here on screen, normally you wouldn’t want to work this way but for showing you all of the controls that are available,
we do want to make sure that you can see where these come from.
Let’s start with the basic speckle, I am just going to click down here so we can see the speckle, and you can see that each time I click on this, it’s showing me the same speckle.
So where is this coming from?
You’ll notice that in the dab type we have the dynamic speckle bristle selected and it’s the dynamic speckle panel that you can control what is going on in the individual speckles.
Let’s take a look at that.
First of we have count and if I turn it down you will see that we get less speckle, turn it up and we get more.
So you can control the count or number of speckle within the speckle dab and we can also adjust the size of the speckle.
There is a bit of an inter relationship between size and count, you will sometimes see that you can get smaller or larger speckles based on
the count and it’s just a vagary of how count and size inter relate with one another.
We have also got minimal size and normally this setting doesn’t do anything however if we set pressure and I now start to draw with it we go from small to larger.
So we can control the size of speckle within the stroke via the minimum size and pressure adjustment.
Scale size relates if we go back over to size and we set this for pressure and we make our adjustment here,
you’ll see first of all it’s making the whole stroke go from very small to large as I press down because we are using pressure and
if I turn this scale size up you will see the speckles within the stroke are changing size as well.
Let’s go ahead and take a look at edges now, you’ve got two basic styles here, the one we have been using so far are the hard edges,
if I switch this over and turn the soft edges on now, you’ll see that the individual speckles have become soft so that gives us two different kind of speckle appearance that we can have.
Let’s take a look at the next one, I’m going to switch back to hard edges for clarity here.
We can also once we got this setup play around with Speckle randomness. Now if you just turn this up, you won’t see anything happen, you almost always enable jitter.
Now you can see I am getting each individual speckle along the stroke changing depending on how high up you set size you’ll get either a less aggressive or more aggressive version of that.
You can also go down to opacity jitter, let’s turn that up and now you can see it’s actually not only changing the size but we’ve also enabled the ability of opacity to change.
I now want to show you some controls that influence the way the dynamic speckles work but they aren’t exactly obvious.
The first one deals with color. Now here’s where we are so far with our brush, all the colors are the same, if I wanted to make these colors random,
I would go to down to color variability and just crank that up and it will change color by stroke.
But what if I want each particle to change color. For that we would need to go to the blending palette and
what’s happening here is at the moment amount in terms of the stroke length is turned to zero.
If we turn this up, we will now get the individual particles to change, so using a combination of the blending controls and the stroke amount slider as well as the color variability controls,
you can either get the color to change on a per stroke basis or you can get each individual particle within the stroke to change color.
For this particular portion of the demo, I have gone ahead and returned to basic brush that we started with and I want to show a couple ways you can influence this.
First one is stroke jitter, and if I turn this up, you can see that you get this amazing distribution and it’s all controlled by how much you turn this up.
Even if you turn it up just a little way you can see now that instead of getting that perfect aligned stroke,
your starting to get randomness going on, the more you turn it up, the greater it’s going to become.
This is a way of breaking out of having all your speckles following each other in lock step and start to provide some randomness
Finally we are going to look at spacing, everything I have been doing up to now shows the speckles following one another in lock step.
However if we go over to the spacing panel and you turn it down from where I had it for this particular brush, I can now start to get a continuous brush.
So don’t think that speckles are only for creating random patterns of individual speckles,
you can also use this in creating the service of actual strokes that are continuous based on the spacing itself.
Now another little trick I’ll show you while I am here, if I turn stroke jitter up a little bit and turn on this continuous time deposition, and turn spacing down.
Now I’ve got a brush that acts in the method similar to an airbrush, this is yet another thing using spacing and it’s controls, you can add another dimension to dynamic speckles.
So hopefully you’ve seen the fact that the dynamic speckles is a very powerful brush dab type and you can do quite a range of various kinds of looks
based on the setting in both the dynamic speckle panel itself as well as some of these other panels I’ve showed you.
And don’t forget you can go over to the general panel where the actual method and use can make a big difference, not to mention the blending palette,
you’ve got just so many different ways you can go. This gives you the basic construction elements on how you can adjust the speckle pattern to your liking.