What is "natural painting?"
   It is what Painter 5 is all about. At least that is the core concept behind this outstanding program from Metacreations – now, with the new version, there is a lot more. But the major thing which makes Painter 5 stand out is natural painting.
   What is natural painting? Look to the left. This graphic started out its life as a clipart drawing of a mortar and pestle from CorelDraw! Let me say that CorelDraw's clipart has saved my life a million times, but this time, we wanted something a little different, a little more artsy.
   How did we do it? With Painter 5's brushes. Painter has a unique tool called tracing paper. You use it to trace an image with a different type of brush, then save the tracing and, behold, an entirely new image. And, thanks to an autoclone feature, you don't have to even do the actual tracing, the program does it for you.
   The person who wanted this mortar and pestle was just delighted. It gave his whole project a lot of spark. We were happy, too. Because it made him happy.
   Brushes are so at the heart of Painter that version 5 has a whole window full of "new" ones. They have stuff like fire, twirls, glows and the like. These things are a lot different than the filters you might find in other programs because they are brushes. You can brush these effects into your artwork and get some really incredible stuff. In addition to the things you see here, there are scads of additional brushes on the Painter CD. You could probably work with the program for six months and never use the same brush twice.
   If this were not enough cool stuff, Painter 5 offers something called "nozzles." The drawing (yes, it is a drawing) on the left is done almost exclusively with these nozzles.
   What's a nozzle?
   Think of a hose nozzle filled with images. In the picture on the left, we filled one nozzle with clouds and "sprayed" them into the sky; we filled another with the houses and did the same (obliterating the sky). Then, for fun, we made the "doorway" with rocks with a third nozzle and added the ivy (ya' gotta' have ivy on rocks) with a fourth nozzle.
   Like the burshes, there are tons of nozzles on the CD and you can also make your own. The process is easy. Note for instance, that the houses are different sizes and shapes. Yes, we loaded different sizes and shapes into the nozzle so we got a random pattern.
   The best part: all this took about two hours to learn with the outstanding tutorial that accompanies the program. Needless to say, to become really proficient requires a lot more time, but we made the mortar and pestle illustration right after we finished the tutorial.
   Painter 5 also does movies, which can be output to Quicktime or GIF animations.
   It would be totally unfair were we to leave you with the impression that what Painter 5 does is lots of fancy stuff with nozzles, strange brushes and the like. As we said at the beginning of this review, the heart of the program is natural painting: with means the program comes with a whole host of natural-type brushes – pencils and chalk, markers and crayons – all of which can be varied by color, opacity, size, angle and a host of other things. These brushes can be painted on a huge variety of "paper" types and also come with pattern and weave variants.
   There are masks, "floaters" to apply effects and scripts, which means you can repeat an effect on a variety of images. Had we scripted the mortar and pestle, for instance, we could have brought in all sorts of "smooth" artwork and applied the same effect to them.
   A totally outstanding program!

   Link to the Metacreations web site.