Corel Painter is a digital painting application for Windows and macOS, used to draw illustrations, develop concept art, and turn photographs into paintings. Its brush engines simulate traditional media, while layers, selections, and composition guides provide ways to build and revise the image digitally.
Corel Painter’s natural-media brushes
The choice of brush changes how paint behaves on the canvas. Watercolor simulates pigment flowing, mixing, absorbing into a surface, and evaporating. Pastel variants range from harder strokes that expose paper texture to softer strokes that cover it. Thick Paint adds depth and texture, giving a different surface treatment from a flat wash of color.
Fluid brushes let you build up paint, blend it, sculpt it, or apply glazes. Their use of layer transparency gives you control over the opacity of successive strokes. Corel Painter also includes pencils, charcoal, inks, oils, airbrushes, and blenders, so a drawing can combine dry marks with painted and blended areas.
Brush variants and stylus input
Painter organizes brushes into categories and variants, with previews showing their strokes before you paint. Brush controls adjust properties such as size, shape, angle, flow, opacity, and grain.
A compatible drawing tablet supplies pressure, tilt, bearing, and rotation information to brushes that use those inputs. The Brush Tracking window calibrates the response to your stylus. Frequently used brushes can be collected in a custom palette, and palettes can be saved for later paintings. You can also create custom brushes and import custom content.
Color mixing
Corel Painter offers several ways to prepare colors. The Color Wheel uses sliders for color selection and includes harmonies for related combinations. Color Set Libraries provide existing collections and let you create sets containing the colors for a particular painting. In the Mixer, you place selected colors on a palette and see how they blend together, then use that mixture as part of the painting process.
Canvas composition
You can pan, zoom, and rotate the canvas while working on details or changing the direction of a stroke. Perspective Guides support drawings that depend on perspective, while a Layout Grid provides a reference for arranging elements. Mirror Painting repeats marks symmetrically. Surface textures and lighting add another level of control over how the painted surface appears.
Layers, masks and selections
Painting on a separate layer keeps new strokes apart from the original drawing. If those strokes need replacing, the layer can be removed while retaining the drawing beneath it. Layer opacity and blend modes control how painted areas combine, and masks let you control which parts of a layer remain visible. Painter also has dedicated Watercolor and Thick Paint layers for those media.
Selections isolate areas for filling or further changes. Selection brushes can select by color, letting you target a colored region before changing its color, lighting, or texture. A selection overlay makes the selected area easier to see when its boundary is complex or includes transparency.
Photo cloning
Corel Painter can use a photograph as the starting point for a painted image. Clone duplicates the image and embeds it as the clone source. Quick Clone performs that preparation and also enables tracing paper and selects a cloner brush, giving you a prepared surface from which to begin painting.
The photograph remains a reference while you decide how to rebuild it with brushwork. Painting on a new layer helps reveal areas where the photograph still shows through. Brush controls, including size and opacity, can be adjusted as you move between broad painted areas and finer details.
PSD exchange with Photoshop
PSD support allows artwork to move between Corel Painter and Photoshop. Painter’s brushwork can then be combined with further editing in Photoshop.
