Subtitles of the Movie

So before we get too involved in any kind of real finished penciling, I wanted to take some time and go over the pencil tools that are going to be included in the project download files and they will be just part of that whole brush library. You can install each one wherever you want to; however, I put them all in the one category for pencils and I'll explain to you what they do and why they're there. But before we get too involved in pencils, we have to understand that pencils incorporate Painter's model of paper grain and we can launch the papers palette that we see right here either by going to Window, Library Palettes, Papers or by going over here, clicking on this first button and then clicking this little black arrow to launch palette. Once we have this palette open, the first button that we see right here is the very, very most important button and the reason why is because this controls the directional grain, which is a much more sophisticated model for incorporating paper grain into our pages. This is one of those things that makes Painter superior to Photoshop. Now, it does take a little bit more computing power so if you notice that your computer's slowing down while you're penciling, maybe you might not want to enable this but if you have a powerful computer, a modern computer, this really shouldn't be any kind of a problem. So I'm just going to go ahead and start working with these tools but I'm going to enable this and when I get to the end I'm going to show you what it looks like without it. This is the Hair Pencil and it's the first pencil to choose from in this category that I've created here and the Hair Pencil is based on that Photoshop model of taking a captured dab, an image basically and then applying that as a brush. So here is just a brush that's, as you can see here, several dots applied more or less in kind of a circular pattern and when I pull them out, you see that I get this sort of interesting, wavy, fly-away hair line and this can be very, very useful for creating some sort of unexpected randomness in your pencil drawings. This also represents the Art Pen's rotational feature. So if you have the Art Pen, this actually will respond as you're moving to a certain amount of rotation as you can see there with those marks I was making. What I like this for is primarily for fly-aways like so. So if you get really comfortable with it and you're looking for something maybe a little bit more random and a little bit more fun, this can be really great when you're in your breakdown stage or when you're working on something just to kind of get some motion and hair is one of those things that can really help you get a lot of motion and life but people tend to get a little too static and too controlled with it. This'll just allow you to be a little bit more painterly. Now, if we go to the next one, you'll see that we have the Real 2B, the Real 2H and the Real 4H. Now, all these are basically based upon the default variants that come with Painter 11; however, I modified them so that they will take advantage of some of the rotational aspect of the Art Pen, as well as some slight variational quirks that I ironed out of it. The main point of all these pencils is that when you draw with the point of your art pen, you're going to get a very thin, controlled line like you would normally expect and when you tilt the pen, you will get a fatter line, much like you would expect with a real pencil. Now, like I said, these all interact with that paper grain so this is going to look different if I changed paper grain and so if I choose something like say Sandy Rough Pastel Paper, I'm going to get a different paper grain or if I choose something like Charcoal Paper, I'm going to get a different paper grain. So yeah, you want to take into consideration when you're working what kind of paper grain you actually want. Now, the last one here is Real Non-Photo Pencil. This is a custom one that I made and this is for people who have the old non-photo blue penciling technique stuck in their brain where they want to draw the roughs with a non-photo blue pencil; that way you won't see it when you see the pencil's reproduced and while that doesn't really hold any water anymore in the modern age of the computer in the sense that layers allow you to do that, where you just be messy as you want to be, throw up a new layer and then you tighten things up. In the old days it wasn't quite so easy and there's a lot of people who are coming from the old school who kind of need something that's going to be a little bit of a crutch for them so that Real Non-Photo Pencil is right here and it's preset and ready to go. It's based upon this Real Soft Colored Pencil and the Real Soft Colored Pencil is effectively the same pencil that you would find in the color pencils category of your Painter install. I just moved it over here and made some minor tweaks to it but it really isn't very good for doing any kind of penciling. However, it's really excellent if you're doing straight to inks and you want to fill in an area of black because it will give a very nice, grainy, sort of slightly grainy quality for this. Now, like I said before, if we turn this off and we start making our marks, we're going to see a very distinct difference. You can see here how this looks very, very computery, the paper grain is very uniformly filled throughout the entire thing and if I take something like, say, Fine Dots, you'll really see it. See how uniform that is? That's not very natural at all. You turn this on, see how much more natural that is? It's not really natural because of the paper grain but it looks a lot more natural than this does so just bear that in mind when you're thinking about, you know, what type of paper am I going to use. Remember to use that little icon right there. Sometimes you'll find your paper grains also behave a little bit better if you invert them because maybe for whatever reason they were inverted at some point in time. The last category that I want to talk about here is related to these and that's the blenders category. There's only going to be two blenders in my blenders category. There's going to be the Real Pointy Blender and the Smudge Coloring Blender. The Smudge Coloring Blender is really going to come into play in the coloring section so we're not going to talk about it right now. But the Real Pointy Blender is based upon the same idea of the pencil in the sense that when you draw with the point, you're going to get a fine blender and when you turn it on its side, you're going to get a fat blender and in this way you can have a little bit of control over how this works. Now, this does incorporate the paper grain and it is not perfect. Unfortunately there's nothing that you can do that will make it perfect and the reason why I say it's not perfect is because it picks up the white of the paper, which in the real world would never, ever happen because the white paper is fixed and it won't actually mix. But if you need, for whatever reason, if you're doing straight to colors type pencil work and you need to be able to start creating some various shades of grade, the blender in this Real Pointy Blender is about your best option because there's just not too many good options for a blender. My advice is to do what I'm doing here and pull out from the gray into the white and in this way you'll have a little bit more of a naturalistic look. If you start pulling from the white in, you're going to get a very unnatural, computer look. So just bear in mind, pull out from the dark into the light and that'll give you a much more natural look and that's my best advice when it comes to blenders.