LESSON 22 · ARTRAGE 6

ArtRage is not a smaller Photoshop. It is a simulation of wet paint sitting on a textured surface, and almost everything odd about it makes sense once you understand that. This lesson covers the canvas and its grain, the tool set, and the .ptg file that holds the whole simulation together.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L5, L7

• ArtRage 6 installed and launching
• Your Artist 12 connected, driver installed, pressure curve set from L3
• A folder set aside for ArtRage work, separate from your Photoshop files

WATCH

Daniel Ibanez — A calm tour of where everything lives before you try to paint anything.

Ambient Design — From the developers. Shows the natural media tools behaving the way they are meant to.

LozsArt — Layers work here too, but they hold paint rather than pixels — worth seeing before you rely on them.

THE LESSON

Photoshop stores a grid of coloured pixels. ArtRage stores something else entirely. Its native format, .ptg, records how much paint is sitting on the canvas and how wet that paint is, along with your layers. That is why a stroke of oil can pick up the colour of the stroke underneath it, why a palette knife can smear paint that is already there, and why the same brush behaves differently on a rough canvas than a smooth one.

It also explains the trade. In Photoshop you have total control over pixels and no idea what paint is. In ArtRage you have real paint behaviour and less control over pixels. Neither is better. You will use both, and Module 6 finishes by connecting them.

One consequence matters immediately: the paint simulation lives only in the .ptg file. The moment you export to PNG or JPEG you have a flat photograph of the result, and the record of how much paint is there and how wet it is has gone. Keep the .ptg. Always.

The Canvas Properties give you two settings that most people skip and then wonder about: Canvas Grain and Canvas Pattern. Grain is the microscopic tooth of the surface. It is what a pencil catches on, what a dry brush skips over, and where watercolour settles. Pattern is the larger visible texture of the material itself.

Here is the rule that catches everybody. Changing the canvas settings later does not alter paint you have already applied. If you paint half a picture on a smooth canvas and then switch to a coarse one, the existing strokes keep the smooth surface they were laid on and only new strokes use the new grain. So decide the surface first, the same way you would choose paper before you start a drawing. If you are unsure, paint a quick test strip and look at it before committing an hour to the real thing.

Also give some thought to size at this stage. As in L5, work at the pixel size you actually need. ArtRage is simulating physics across every square of your canvas, so a needlessly enormous file will slow the brushes down long before it improves the picture.

The natural media tools are the reason you are here: Oil Brush, Watercolor, Pencil, Ink Pen, Airbrush, Paint Roller, Palette Knife, Gloop Pen and the Blending tool. Each one is a small simulation with its own settings, and each responds to the 16,384 pressure levels and 60 degrees of tilt your X4 stylus reports. These get their own lessons in L23 and L24.

The digital utility tools are the ones that have no traditional equivalent: Text, Color Sampler, Selections, Transformations, Fill and the Cloner. Think of these as the parts of Photoshop that ArtRage kept because they are genuinely useful, not because a painter would recognise them.

Anything you customise can be stored and reused. A tool preset saves as .prs, a collection of colour samples saves as .col, and .arpack is ArtRage's universal container — it can carry stencils, stickers, presets and scripts in a single file. Those are the extensions you will see. If a tutorial or forum post mentions a file type you have never seen in ArtRage's own save dialogue, be suspicious.

The manual puts this bluntly, and it is worth memorising: "Always use Save to save your paintings, don't be tempted to use Export as if it was Save." Save writes the .ptg with all the paint data intact. File > Export As Image writes a flat copy in JPEG, PSD, BMP, TIFF, GIF or PNG — good for showing people, useless for continuing work.

Build the habit now: save the .ptg first, then export whatever flat copy you need alongside it, with the same base name. The one exception is PSD, which carries layers, blend modes and groups across into Photoshop — that is the bridge you will build in L25, and even then the .ptg stays your master file.

You own ArtRage 6, which Ambient Design no longer sells; the current products are ArtRage Vitae and ArtRage Lite. Everything in this module is written for AR6 and remains valid for it. Where Vitae has moved something, this course flags it, but expect some panel names and icons to differ if you ever move across. Nothing about grain, paint wetness or the .ptg concept changes.

The manual is an online wiki rather than a book, so read it by topic, not front to back. In the app, Help > ArtRage Manual takes you there. If you want one document you can read straight through, the ArtRage 4 PDF manual is still around 90 per cent applicable and it is the most readable single source that exists. There is no PDF manual for AR6.

PRACTICE · 30 MIN

1. Create a new painting at 2480 x 1748 px.
2. In Canvas Properties, set the grain to its smoothest setting.
3. Draw the same three marks across the top third of the canvas: a slow pencil stroke, a fast one, and a dry-looking brush stroke.
4. Change the canvas to a coarse grain and repeat the same three marks across the middle third.
5. Look at the top third again. Confirm for yourself that it did not change.
6. Change the canvas once more to a different pattern and repeat the three marks across the bottom third.
7. Save the file as L22-grain-test.ptg in your ArtRage folder.
8. Now use File > Export As Image to write a PNG next to it with the same base name.
9. Close everything, reopen the .ptg, and add one more stroke. Then try opening the PNG in ArtRage and notice what you cannot do with it.

Done when: You have a .ptg with three bands of marks on three different surfaces, a PNG beside it, and you can state in one sentence what the .ptg can do that the PNG cannot.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.