The Painter 7 Wow! Book

By Cher Threinen-Pendarvis

From PeachPit Press
(c) 2002 Cher Threinen-Pendarvis
ISBN 0-201-70899-X
404 pps, w/ CD
$49.99 (US), $77.99 (CAN) UK £37.99

Review by Gary Coyne

Intended user: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced

While it is not hard to select a brush and run it around the screen, to do so in artistic ways is a bit more difficult. And, when using Painter which has so many palettes (7), sub-palettes (30) and permutations of every operation imaginable, even selecting a brush let alone knowing what to do with it can become a major challenge. While the manual that comes with Painter 7 is fairly good as far as 1st party manuals go, it isn't great. The Painter 7 Wow! Book does a very good job in filling this need.

[You can find a review of Painter here.]

As stated, this book can be used by beginners through advanced users. This is a big undertaking, especially since Painter is not an easy program to get into. It is known for having an overabundance of palettes and sub-palettes, but Cher Threinen-Pendarvis does an admirable job of breaking down the program to a reasonable level. The first chapter is devoted solely to the basics of Painter: from setting it up in your computer, managing the palettes, understanding the various formats for saving files in, and even customizing the program to suit your needs. I truly marvel at Cher's ability to summarize so much so efficiently.

[Far be it from me to challenge the author on issues related to Painter, but there is an important point to bring up on page 7: Cher recommends that the users of Painter defragment their hard drives to obtain maximum use and speed of Painter's Temp file (created when the program starts and is removed when the program is turned off). While this is a good idea in general, let me warn against doing this if you are using both OS 9 AND OS X, and any "not-up-to-date" maintenance program like Norton's (version 6) or TechTool 3. The reason is that these programs not only defragment, but re-arrange the data on the hard drive for maximum access efficiency. While these programs do a great job of this for OS 9 data, they are unaware of what the files for OS X are and what to do about them. As such, these programs are known to move OS X files around to inefficient locations on the hard drive causing a negative effect on your OS X performance. If you have OS X on your hard drive I recommend that you upgrade to the latest version of Norton's and/or Drive 10 to achieve your defragmentation goals.]

The 2nd chapter starts with explanations of color and how Painter uses color (and how one uses color in Painter). The first lesson is how to add color and gradations to some line art. Here is where my love/hate relation begins with this book. The author does an excellent job of explaining how to add color (and gradations) to a line art drawing, but leaves the reader to create their own line art drawing to work from. I am bothered by this because now I must take the time to create a line art drawing before I can learn the techniques presented in this lesson. What's most infuriating about this is that this book comes with a CD. As you will read later in the review, the vast majority of images used in this book for the lessons are not included on the CD for the reader to use as a teaching tool.

If the lesson was how to create line art, than I suppose there is no harm/no foul for requiring me to create my own. But I am not the best artist in the world and the reality is that I ,or someone like me, may get so frustrated with trying to create some line art (for a lesson on how to add color) that they give up on the intended lesson in specific or Painter in general.

Following in the same vein, the 2nd lesson in this chapter explains how to color in a scanned line image. And again, if you do not have a scanner (unlikely), do not have a scanner working in OS X yet (somewhat likely), or do not have a copy of the image used in the lesson (very likely except for the small sample they do provide), you are, once again, left to go to the store to see if you can find an appropriate image to select from (say) a kid's coloring book.

Each lesson has the title in large bold print allowing the reader to easily notice/find each lesson as they thumb through the book. After the title, there is an italic-font summary (Overview) of the various processes presented in that lesson. These are excellent because they show the reader very quickly what they are getting into. Most lesson's starts are typically from 2 - 5 pages in length (there are a few that are one page long and some that are longer). I do not feel that Cher was too concerned about cutting work to make it fit in this format as the various lessons do feel complete.

Continuing in the mode of chapter 2, all chapters start with a primer on how Painter implements that chapter's subject. Following the primer, there are multiple lessons. At the end of each chapter are a collection of artworks from a variety of digital art masters. Some discussion is included on what was done and how it was done for each image along with a short bio of the artist. (Gotta' confess: I'm not sure I fully appreciate the extra information, or aim totally humbled by their work. A little of both I guess...)

The book's side-bars, which are always on the left side of odd and even pages, are filled with either examples of what your drawing should look like, screen-shots of the various windows and/or palettes you should be using at that point, or tips and suggestions on how best to use Painter. Regrettably, these are not in the Index and if you saw a given tip somewhere and forgot the specific information and/or where you saw it, consider it gone. This is a pity because the information that the author provides in these tips are wonderful. My only suggestion (unless the author chooses to index them and provide this on PeachPit's web site) is to take notes.

The accompanying CD comes with a good variety of free Painter tools such as Brushes, Lighting, Patterns, Scripts, and Textures. It also has samples of artwork from renown artists typically showing their work in QuickTime movies. These QT movies include studies of variations (changing before your eyes) and/or development (art is developed before your eyes). Some provide actions, brushes, textures and the like. Also included on the CD is Painter TV (here the TV stands for Trial Version, 30 day life span).

What is not included on the CD are most of the images used for lessons in the book. I don't know why they are missing, but the vast majority of images provided seem more of a sales opportunity by various image houses. While I have no problem with these being there (mostly I'm delighted for them to be there as they are superbly done and provide wonderful incentives), I see no reason why the images used in the lessons are not provided.

Amongst the QuickTime movies, there is a collection specifically for demonstrating the QuickTime movies that Painter can create (did you know that a number of the on-air promos used on Fox TV were created with (or extensively used) Painter) Samples of these are included. However, not only can Painter create QT movies, it can also "enhance" QT movies. By opening a movie into Painter, one can create an Action and have Painter apply that action to every frame within the movie. Thus, if you wish to create a canvas texture to a family movie--no problem. In this case, the CD actually did provide the movie used in the lesson for the reader to test upon. Ah, were it all this easy...

Cher is a wonderful writer, good teacher, and provides excellent examples of how to use Painter. However, to not provide the images used in the lessons is just plain wrong. While the reader will have to get by without these images, I do encourage anyone wishing to know how to use Painter, or to improve their use of Painter will enjoy this book.

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