More Experimentation with Corel Painter

(This post has been in my drafts for nearly a year. I want to keep expanding on this in the future, so...here you go.)

I've been spending hours fiddling with the brush control panels in Corel Painter trying to create usable custom brushes.

Playing with particles, opacity, spacing, blending, damping, global chaos, local chaos, color jitter and a million other settings eventually makes you tired.

This inevitably leads to taking a break to watch youtube videos...

Painter has a feature called audio expression which allows for sound input to influence your brush as you are painting. I've been toying with this a bit so...

Searching YT for audio painting, I found an old video of Android Jones painting with sound in Alchemy:

After watching this I went back into Painter and tried yelling weird noises in my mic while drawing to little effect.

Painter doesn't have the shape distortion effects that Alchemy has and I don't think alchemy has been updated in about 7 years.

I then played music mp3's while painting with Audio Expressions on, but got varied, and very uncontrollable results. It seems only slightly more useful than random jitter.

Eventually I got to wondering what kind of sound oscillator he has strapped to his tablet.

Having no knowledge of audio equipment I went back to the internet and looked at all kinds of things from MPC's, to Moog Modulars, DACs, external sound cards, pedals and keyboard synthesizers.

Eventually I laid my eyes on, and immediately ordered,

this...

It's a Korg Kaossillator 2.

It makes loops, beats and funny noises. If you plug it into your microphone jack it works directly with Painter's audio expressions.

After a lot of tweaking and tinkering I got it to work pretty well with some of my custom brushes. You can dial in specific colors and get gradients within a single stroke.

Ultimately though, it's just a fancy way of sliding your volume up and down.

An external audio input device with "audio expression" turned on gives you one more control option for your brush besides tilt, pressure, bearing etc. So that is pretty nifty.

Still, I look forward to Corel coming up with more in depth ways to incorporate sound into your painting experience, and I will continue to experiment along these lines.

Here's some messy sketching:

They may not look like much but It's just the beginning. More neon vomit doodles too come...