Hi, my name is Karen Bonnaker and I'd like to welcome you to my world of digital painting. Digital painting has increased in popularity over the last few years. The tools for painting digitally are endless. And Painter Essentials 7 is one of the better tools for exploring digital media from oils to watercolors and more. Painting digitally is an excellent way to discover different art forms or start a new path in your artistic journey. Painter Essentials 7 is one of the most user-friendly natural media painting programs which will have you painting in no time. Like the tools of traditional painter, the digital painter must consider a few things before starting. The tools of the digital artist include a drawing pad, stylus and of course a computer. The stylus functions just like the brush in the sense that it deposits the brush marks on the computer screen as you compose your painting. For this tutorial, I have chosen to follow one of my favorite artists, John Constable. I will put my focus on painting the clouds, how you render the edges is critical when painting the sky. So let's get started on a relatively simple landscape on a digital canvas. To begin, you're going to open Painter Essentials and we're going to go up to File and Choose New. I like to size my painting based on whether I will be printing it. So for this painting, I will create a 17 by 11 canvas at 300 PPI. It is not essential to work with high PPI setting if you do not plan to print your painting. Instead, simply use 150 PPI which will suffice nicely. So we're going to go ahead and change this from pixels to inches and we're going to go ahead and make the width 17 and the height 11. We'll go ahead and keep the resolution at pixels per inch at 300. The canvas color will remain white and we'll select OK. And from there, we open up this beautiful canvas that we can start working on. I like to tone my canvas. A pure white canvas can be very intimidating and adding a subtle color can influence the color choices you make going forward. So I'm going to use what we call the Paint Bucket tool which will fill the canvas with just the right tone to get started with. The Paint Bucket tool is located on the toolbar which resides on the left hand side of the interface. Here the color you want to use by choosing it from the color wheel and then fill the canvas with the color by clicking on the canvas layer. The color wheel resides here and we also have a color set which we can use which is default. So if there happens to be a color in here that you like or you want to refine that color further, you can use the color wheel to get just the right color for your painting. So I'm going to settle on this blue value and come over to the Paint Bucket and simply click on the canvas and it's going to fill my canvas with a solid color. Start with a sketch. The sketch is your roadmap to help you envision your painting. You will want to add a new layer directly above the tone canvas. To add a new layer, simply select the new layer option and it will add a new layer directly above your canvas layer. So this is the layer you're going to begin your sketch on. In this step I want to show you one of the most exciting things about Painter Essential 7. Let's the ability to use a mixer pad and actually mix your own colors just like you're working on a natural media workflow. With Painter Essential 7, it's like having your own palette of colors to choose from. Mixing colors and essentials is very similar to mixing on a traditional palette. In the example you can see that I have set up a color string of those colors I feel will work well in my painting. And everything in nature is influenced by color in light. If you want to sample color, you can choose this sample color tool which is located on the panel and just simply select the color and you'll notice that as I do that, it changes on the color wheel. If I want to mix my colors or apply colors, say for example I want to choose a color from my sketch, all I have to do is hold my alt key down and sample the color and then come over and paint that color onto my mixer pad. From that point I can continue to add some of the basic colors for mixing or do some of my own color mixing right on the mixer pad itself. When it comes to choosing the medium that you want to work with, there are many choices in painter essentials. You can work with watercolor, oils, acrylics and more. One of the most exciting things about working digitally is that you can combine the different mediums on one layer or multiple layers and you can paint with oil paints on one layer and water colors on another. So there's no end to the creativity. To find the brush that you want to work with, open the options fly out for the brush categories and begin to scan through the different brushes that are available, acrylics, air brushes, artists, digital watercolor. Some of these wonderful glazing brushes, pencils, pens, markers and more. Now going to start building the painting from the background to the middle ground to the foreground. And I've gone and chosen the Sergeant brush from the Artist Brush category. And to do that, I open the fly out, go to Artist and select the Sergeant brush. If you have never thought of exploring digital painting, then there has never been a better time. Painter Essentials 7 is an excellent choice for digital painting. The brushes and painter essentials emulate the traditional look and feel of natural media paints. They blend and they drip and they move on your canvas just like the real thing. You can impart texture from the paper to each brushstroke and explore hundreds of amazing expressive brushes. There is something extraordinary waiting for you with the very first digital brushstroke. So give painter essentials and digital painting a try sometime and happy painting.