This is the third and final workshop in my Chimpski series. ImagineFX challenged me to learn Corel Painter IX and I can never resist a challenge! Two months ago, my goal was to get my head around Painter and assess its potential as part of my workflow. The previous two workshops have been produced almost exclusively in Painter IX, but in this one I’m going to explore using Painter IX.5 and Photoshop together.

In the previous workshops, there have been occasions where I’ve struggled in Painter to do something that would be quick and easy for me to do in Photoshop. I stubbornly stuck with Painter until I resolved the problem or found an alternative. It helped me familiarise myself with the package, and particularly its online help. It also seemed appropriate to the challenge that I didn’t sneak back to my old friend Photoshop at every hurdle. But as a freelance illustrator, an hour or two spent searching through online help is an hour or two working further into the small hours. And, more importantly, there are things that Photoshop just does better. Photoshop is a world leading photo-editing package that boasts a multitude of tools for colour adjustments and compositional tweaking and, at this point, I’d rather do this kind of fiddling in Photoshop. Photoshop also has great brushes and I don’t see an end to my Photoshop painting. But Painter has a wealth of beautiful brushes that do a good job of impersonating real media and I think I can successfully incorporate Painter IX into my workflow.

In the previous instalment, Chimpski arrived on the moon. This month, Chimpski recovers from his bad landing and writes a postcard home.