Medium Toned Paper in P8?

[Blind]

** Mods: Cross-posted from PAINTER 7/8 FEEDBACK & HELP, but there's not much traffic in there >8\ **

Hi all... I'm playing around with the Painter 8 demo. I don't really need 90% of what it does, but the one thing I'd love to be able to do with it is emulate black & white sketching (charcoal, pencil, prisma, etc.) on a grainy medium-toned paper. I don't mean having the texture applied to my brush strokes (well, that too but...), I mean that I want to start out on a blank canvas that looks like a medium-toned grainy paper and I just want to use something like the charcoal or pencil brushes on it in greyscale. Canson Me-Teintes is a good example.

If you have ever seen any of KChen's gargoyle sketches (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=611&highlight=gargoyle) you'll see what I'm shooting for. errr... rather, I'm not necessarily drawing gargoyles, heh... but you see what I mean. I'd like to emulate that particular media combination. Does that make sense?

[gekitsu]

could you also tell what your main problem is?
is it that you are new to painter and don't know what is where?
do you struggle with how to make that paper background convincing?
don't you know which tools to use?

or something eintirely different?

things you would need to have an eye on are:
-brushes that "cover", that don't "buildup". buildup mode will always darken, as ink washes would do, for example. not what you want for working in lighter tones on dark background. :)
isn't there even a brush category called conté?
prismacolor-likes could most likely be found at the colored pencils variant.

-a convincing paper texture.
you can do them yourself or use painter's stock textures for simpler effects. (for tryout of this technique, the stock papers should just be enough)

-there is a tool that lets you apply the paper texture to your canvas. it's found in effects -> surface -> color overlay
you could use that to bring some paper structure to your canvas.

hope that helped a bit :)

[Blind]

-there is a tool that lets you apply the paper texture to your canvas. it's found in effects -> surface -> color overlay

Aha!! This is it! Thanks, Gekitsu! I picked my foreground color, then a paper texture (charcoal paper), and then applied color overlay to my canvas and I have a decent emulation of Canson paper in any shade I want!! Nice!

As you can probably imagine... I'm very new at Painter... still just playing around with the demo. I know probably 1% of what it's capable of, but that's already enough for what I would like to do with it, which is replace my natural media (medium toned paper, charcoal, graphite & Prismas) on my laptop when I can't bring them along with me >8) Vielen Danke!!

[Blind]

Ok, one last question and I'll shut up about Painter >8)

Given what I'm trying to do with Painter: basically emulating charcoal/pencil sketching on medium toned paper... do I really need Painter 8? My thinking is, perhaps I can go with an older version I could find in a bargain bin somewhere and save some $$? Why spend the big bucks to get the latest version when I only want the smallest part of what it does, right? But... if so, how far can I go back and still do this? I would just need it to do that color overlay thing to create the paper, and still have some decent charcoal & pencil brushes. Version 6?

[gekitsu]

the best version would be 6, then.
version 5 and 5.5 share some incompatibilities with later versions but since 6, nothing has changed really with these dry media things you want to emulate.
besides the way they are saved, of course :) p6 saves in .brs, a bit of a blah to handle file format while brushes are saved in xml in version 7 and newer.

[Blind]

hmmm... I see. Ok... I'll take a peek around and see if I can find it. Thanks again!