The Paint Synthesizer
At the core of Studio Artist is its Paint Synthesizer, the engine that runs all of the program's painting tools. In most graphics programs, you select a brush and then open up the program's brush property palette to make modifications to the size of the brush, its shape, its opacity and maybe a few other options. Some of these programs even let you store your presets for easy access. Studio Artist works in much the same way, except that instead of 10 or 20 or 50 parameters, it gives you upward of 400 adjustable parameters split into 27 different categories for modifying every conceivable aspect of a brush. In other words, Studio Artist has more parameter categories than most graphics programs have parameters. And it provides 13 different base brush types for working with these parameters. For example, you can select Interactive Pen as your base brush type, which will function as an ordinary paint brush like those you've experienced in Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter or other graphics applications (except that you have more parameters to choose from). Or you can choose the Interactive Multipen brush type, which works like a regular Interactive Pen but with multiple nibs plus several extra options of its own (number of nibs, nib array patterns, path tracking, weaving, etc.). [an error occurred while processing this directive]Here are some examples of the different types of brushes. Keep in mind that all 3,000 of the included brushes (or any that you create yourself) can be switched to a different brush mode with the click of a button, so it's difficult to provide a representative sample of these brush types.

Autodraw brushes
Autodraw brushes allow you to paint using a source image to determine the color of the paint, the distribution of substrokes, color, luminosity, etc. The six examples below show the canvas with Autodraw Interactive brushes applied to an image of an eye. Some look as if they've applied paint stroke effects to the image like a rough tracing, while others bear almost no resemblance to the original.



The Autodraw brushes, then, allow you to get recursive with your source image, whether you're working with a piece of clip art, video footage or your own creation. (You can, for example, draw a picture, swap it out as a source image and then process your drawing with the Autodraw tools.)

There are four different kinds of Autodraw brushes:

• Autodraw Interactive, as seen in the examples above, which allow you to draw using a tablet or mouse and yet also expand substrokes out into neighboring regions of your source image;
• Freestyle Autodraw, which lets you draw a path along which the Autodraw brush then paints itself;
• Autodraw One Click, which lets you tap on the canvas once to fill in a region with the brush you've chosen;
• Autodraw Multipen, which behaves like the Autodraw Interactive brush but uses multiple brush nibs at once.

But AUtodraw brushes aren't just for sucking data out of a source image. They're also active brushes that can create flowing styles, scattering strokes, wet paint effects and a variety of other tools. To give you a better idea of how Autodraw brushes work, here's a look at two different types in action, one a dry, charcoal-style brush, the other a splattering wet brush. Both are set to clone the source image in some way, though this isn't necessary with Autodraw brushes. (Click the Play button to watch.)



Interactive brushes
Like Autodraw brushes, Interactive brushes can come in as many varieties as you'd care to imagine. They can be wet-looking; they can have 3D lighting; they can look like chalk or charcoal. You name it, and it can be done. The difference is that Interactive brushes do not extract data from a source image to spread themselves on your canvas. Rather, they simply follow the stroke of your pen (or mouse). They come in two varieties: Interactive Pen and Interactive Multipen. (The Multipen version uses multiple nibs when drawing.) Here's a very small sampling from the billions of potential brushes you can create.





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