Tutorial. Create your own brush library

Tutorial. Create your own brush library with it's own subcategories of brushes.


This tutorial will consist of two parts first part will be creating the categories containing variants. The second part will show how to turn these categories into a single library that will always be loaded when Painter starts up.

Part One

Start with a square canvas.

With your first brush of your new category selected, mark the canvas in a distinctive way that identifies this particular category,(the canvas will become the category icon) then select all (Cmd/Ctrl A) choose "Capture Brush Category", from the brush selector menu.

Give this first brush the name of the Category, lets call it "cat one" for example. This creates a category and a brush both called "cat one". The brush will be deleted but first from the menu select "Save Variant" and name the brush. Then, with the first brush selected (the one with the same name as the category) go to the menu and select "Delete Variant". You now have a Category name and a brush with it's own distinctive name.

You can continue to create variants of your new category and save them keeping the colours as well. But what if you want to save other brushes into this new Category, keeping their colours and also giving them a distinctive name? Well, typically Corel make this more difficult than it needs to be. You can select "Copy Variant" from the menu but it will have the default name and it won't retain it's colour. What you have to do is first choose your new brush then select "Save Variant" from the menu. This will save it with the name you have chosen (and colours if you check the box) at the bottom of the category that it was in. Now you have to select this new brush and choose "Copy Variant" from the menu and you will have the option to choose your brush category you created earlier ("cat one"). After the brush has been copied to your new category you can select it from the category you created it in originally and delete it by choosing "Delete Variant" from the menu.

Now you can go on this way adding more variants to your new Category and you can also create a new category the same way you did the first one and also add variants to it. Lets say you created two more categories called "cat two" and "cat three" (with their own variants) which we'll use in the next part.

That's the first part of the lesson. The categories can contain related brushes or it can contain different brushes that are connected by belonging to the same project. What you will now have is three new categories that are appended to your default brush category. The second part of this tutorial shows how to get these new categories into their own library that can be loaded independently of the default brushes, (and shared with others).

Part Two.

First create a folder on your desktop and give it a name, this will be the name of the new library that will contain your new categories you just created. Let's call it "My Library" for example.

Now if you are on a mac go to your **HomeFolder>Library>ApplicationSupport>Corel> PainterIX>Brushes>Painter Brushes and you will find your three brush categories, "cat one, cat two and cat three" each one will also have a .jpg file sitting outside the brush category folder. Select the three category folders plus their .jpg files and drag them to the folder you created on the desktop.
(**Windows — \Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\
Corel Painter IX\)

Now go to Applications>CorelPainterIX and drop the folder on the Desktop onto the Brushes folder.

That's it. Next time you open Painter you will be able to go to the same menu on the brush selector bar and choose "Load Library" and navigate to Applications>Corel Painter>Brushes>My Library and load it up.

Note: you can remake the icons to be much more distinctive for each category. You will find that each brush category has a .jpg file associated with it. Just make a new icon the same size (30 pixels) and give it the same name as the category with a .jpg extension. It is important to be exactly the same name or the brush category will not work at all. Also note that the .jpg icon file sits outside the Category Folder it belongs to. Do not get this .jpg file confused with a .jpg file that you may find inside the category folders, these files are in fact b/w Alphas which are used by captured brushes.