LESSON 23 · ARTRAGE 6

The Oil Brush is the tool ArtRage was built around, and its settings describe a physical brush rather than a digital one. Once you know what Loading, Thinners and Insta-Dry actually do, you can get dry-brush texture, wet-into-wet blending and thick impasto out of the same tool without changing brushes.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L16, L20, L22

• ArtRage 6 open with a fresh canvas at a medium grain
• Your L22 grain reference sheet, for comparison
• Your L22 starter colour collection loaded

WATCH

Ambient Design — From the developers, and the single most useful ArtRage video for this lesson.

Ambient Design — Shows thick paint used as a deliberate effect rather than an accident.

THE LESSON

The Oil Brush has these settings and no others: Pressure, Loading, Thinners, Insta-Dry, Stiffness, Rotation, Aspect, Square Head and Auto Clean. Read that list twice, because tutorials on the internet regularly describe a setting called Thickness. There is no Thickness setting in ArtRage. If a video tells you to adjust one, it is describing a different program, or it is wrong.

Pressure sets how hard the stroke presses into the canvas, working alongside the actual pressure your X4 stylus reports. Loading is how much paint is on the brush. Thinners dilutes the paint. Insta-Dry makes paint already on the canvas behave as though it has dried. Stiffness controls how much the bristles resist and splay. Rotation, Aspect and Square Head shape the head itself — its angle, how squashed it is, and whether it is a round or a flat, square-ended brush. Auto Clean decides whether the brush is wiped between strokes or keeps carrying whatever colour it picked up.

Loading is the setting you will reach for most. Turn it down low and the brush runs out of paint quickly, so the stroke breaks up and catches only the raised parts of the canvas grain. That is a dry-brush effect, and it is how you get broken texture over an underpainting, the suggestion of rough stone or bark, and edges that fade rather than stop. Turn Loading up and the brush carries plenty of paint, laying down thick strokes that stand up off the surface and pick up light.

Thinners does the opposite job. It dilutes the paint so it spreads and blends rather than piling up. At around 50 per cent, Thinners mostly flattens the paint — the strokes stop standing proud of the canvas and start behaving like a thin wash you can push around. This is how you get a smooth base layer to build thicker paint on top of.

The two settings interact, and that is the point. Low Loading with low Thinners gives you scratchy, textural marks. High Loading with low Thinners gives you impasto. Moderate Loading with Thinners at 50 gives you something that blends easily into what is underneath. You are not choosing between brushes; you are describing a brush.

By default your paint is wet, which means a new stroke crossing an old one drags the old colour along with it. That is real oil behaviour, and it is the source of the soft, mixed transitions ArtRage is good at. It is also, if you are not expecting it, the reason your clean blue turns into mud the moment it crosses the orange underneath.

Insta-Dry is the answer. Switch it on and existing paint behaves as though it has dried, so a new stroke sits on top of it as clean colour instead of mixing in. Use it exactly the way an oil painter uses drying time: paint the underlayer wet-into-wet, turn Insta-Dry on, then put your crisp highlights and details over the top without disturbing anything.

Auto Clean controls the brush rather than the canvas. Leave it on and the brush is wiped between strokes, so you get the colour you picked every time. Turn it off and the brush keeps carrying the mix it picked up, which is closer to how a real brush behaves and is a fast way to get a range of related, slightly varied colours out of two swatches — a very useful trick after the limited-palette work in L19.

The Palette Knife smears and scrapes paint that is already on the canvas, and it adds oil paint to each stroke as it goes. Use it to push two colours into each other along the boundary between them, rather than picking an in-between colour in the picker. The result is a transition made of every intermediate colour rather than one guessed one, and it looks it. It is also the fastest way to make a hard edge soft — a short pull across the boundary at a shallow angle.

The Blending tool is the other option. It moves existing paint without adding any. Reach for it when you want to soften something you like without changing the amount of paint on the canvas, and reach for the knife when you want the transition itself to have texture and direction. Both work with your value plan from Module 4: keep hard edges where you want attention, and let the knife or the blender take everything else.

PRACTICE · 40 MIN

1. Open L23-oil-test-board.ptg. It is divided into labelled cells.
2. In row one, paint the same stroke three times at Loading 100, 50 and 10. Do not change anything else.
3. In row two, repeat those three strokes with Thinners at roughly 50 per cent.
4. In row three, lay a band of one colour, then cross it with a second colour — once with Insta-Dry off, once with it on.
5. In row four, do the same crossing test with Auto Clean on, then off. Note which one gives you varied colour.
6. In row five, paint two blocks of different colour touching each other and pull the Palette Knife across the join at a shallow angle.
7. In row six, repeat the same two blocks and soften them with the Blending tool instead. Compare.
8. Save as .ptg. Do not export a flat copy yet.
9. Now paint a sphere on a new layer using what you learned: block in wet-into-wet, turn Insta-Dry on, then add the highlight.

Done when: Every cell of the test board is filled and you can point at the dry-brush stroke, the impasto stroke, the flattened stroke and the two different blends without hesitating. Your sphere has a clean highlight that did not drag the paint underneath it.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

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