Scott:

I will drop another piece of information about ArtRage that I learned while working through that exchange. It may be helpful to know up front, before having to puzzle through it as I did.

If you use a 'brush' brush with lots of loading and little thinner, so the bristle lines are visible, you can get into a *???* moment if you use layers. If you paint on one layer, and then paint something else on a *lower* layer, and you paint underneath an object on the upper layer, hoping to use that upper object's edge as a boundary, you will be surprised when the lower brush stroke's highlight/shading appears through the upper layer's paint. The color won't come through, just the (?alpha? portion) of the brushstroke.

You can eliminate this in a couple ways. The easiest one is to set the blend mode of the top object's layer to 'Replace.' (Of course, it is the last method I learned, as I have to do everything the hard way before finding the easier ones.) One of the harder methods is to export the painting as a PDF and open it in Xara--the layers no longer interact in that manner. The other is to carefully erase the work underneath the upper layer's object.

Also be aware that you cannot move the lighting (as far as I can tell). It will always come from the upper left corner of the painting. You can turn the lights off by pressing F5, but that kinda defeats the purpose of brushes. So be aware that brush strokes in different directions will appear to be slightly different colors because of lighting differences.

I too am glad for gray's exchange--I learned a lot, and greatly respect his abilities. Someday, thanks to his willingness to share, I may approach that level when I have more time to dedicate to these programs.

David