LESSON 25 · ARTRAGE 6

These are ArtRage's power tools: physical stencils you can paint against, a tracing image projected onto the canvas, reference images pinned beside your work, and a brush you design yourself. The lesson finishes with the PSD bridge — the fact that ArtRage both imports and exports Photoshop files with layers, blend modes and groups intact, which is what joins this module to the Photoshop one.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L7, L8, L23, L24

• ArtRage 6 and Photoshop both installed
• A finished or near-finished ArtRage painting with at least three layers
• One photo of your own to use as a reference

WATCH

Unlisted — One of very few recordings of the AR6 Custom Brush Designer actually being used.

Ambient Design — Selections are the tool stencils are most often confused with. Seeing both makes the difference obvious.

THE LESSON

A stencil in ArtRage behaves like a physical sheet laid on the canvas, and it has three modes you switch between. Stencil mode shows the shape in red and blocks paint, so you paint over it and only the exposed area takes colour — the classic cut-out. Ruler mode shows grey and does not block anything; instead it guides your cursor along its edge, which is how you draw a straight line or a perfect ellipse freehand. Guide mode shows blue and lets paint through while still guiding the stroke.

None of the three ever appear in an exported image. They are studio equipment, not artwork, so a stencil can sit on the canvas without ever showing up in the final file.

Stencils, stickers, presets and scripts all travel in the same container: .arpack, the ArtRage Package File. You will see people online refer to .arstencil, .arpalette or .arbrush files. Those extensions do not exist. If a download offers you one, something has gone wrong with the download or with the person describing it.

A Tracing Image is projected onto the canvas itself, underneath your paint, so you can work directly over it. It is saved inside the painting, so it is still there when you reopen the file, and it is invisible on export — the exported image contains only your paint. There is one more feature worth knowing: with colour sampling switched on, each stroke picks up the colour of the tracing image under the pointer, so you can effectively paint a photograph's colours back onto the canvas with your own brushwork.

Use that honestly. Tracing is a fair tool for studying how a form is built and for matching a photo's colour relationships; passing a traced photo off as an original drawing is not. The tracing that teaches you something is the one you do after attempting the drawing freehand first.

Reference Images are different: they are pinned onto the canvas like sheets of paper beside your work, and you can move, scale and rotate them. There are three kinds — References, Scraps and Views. Alt-click (Option-click on a Mac) on one and you sample its colour straight into your brush, which pairs perfectly with the local-colour-versus-light-colour thinking from L20.

The Custom Brush lets you design a brush head rather than pick one from a list. Stickers are related: a sticker's source image is a .stk file, and the Sticker Spray scatters copies of it across the canvas. Two settings control that spray — Autoflow on gives a continuous stream while you hold the stroke, Autoflow off releases the stickers as you drag, and Spray Rate sets how densely they land. Leaves, gravel, snow, distant crowds: anything you would otherwise paint one at a time.

Save what you build. A single tool preset is a .prs; bundle presets, stencils, stickers and scripts together and you get a .arpack you can back up or hand to a friend. Scripts are the odd one out and genuinely useful: a .arscript records every action you take and replays it to recreate the painting from a blank canvas, both a backup of your process and a way to study your own decisions.

Ambient Design publish free colour sets, custom brush presets, inking presets and scripts on their manual site. Download them from the official pages rather than from mirrors — no licence text exists for redistributing them.

This is the most important paragraph in the module. ArtRage both imports and exports Photoshop's PSD format, and it preserves layers, blend modes and groups in both directions. That means the two programs in this course are not separate worlds. You can paint the parts ArtRage is better at — real oil texture, watercolour, grain, palette-knife blending — export a layered PSD, and finish in Photoshop with adjustment layers, masks, type and precise selections. Or start a layered line-art file in Photoshop and bring it into ArtRage to paint over it.

Export the PSD with File > Export As Image and choose PSD from the format list. Two things to keep straight. First, the PSD is a flat photograph of each layer's paint — the record of how much paint is on the canvas, how wet it is and what grain it sits on lives only in the .ptg, so the .ptg stays your master and the PSD is a copy you send onward. Second, stencils and tracing images never appear in exports, so they do not travel across; they stay behind in the .ptg where they belong.

The manual's warning applies here more than anywhere: "Always use Save to save your paintings, don't be tempted to use Export as if it was Save." Export the PSD, keep working on the .ptg, and name both files identically so you always know which pair belongs together. Module 7 picks the painting up on the Photoshop side.

You own ArtRage 6, which is no longer sold — the current products are ArtRage Vitae and ArtRage Lite. Everything here describes AR6. If you ever move to a newer version, check the manual wiki for the current panel names before assuming a feature has gone.

Be aware too that good video tutorials for these particular tools barely exist. Almost everything reliable comes from Ambient Design's own recordings, and stencils and tracing are thinly covered even there. For these features the manual wiki really is the best source available.

PRACTICE · 45 MIN

1. Open a new painting and load the L25 stencil pack.
2. Place one stencil in Stencil mode and paint across it. Then switch the same stencil to Guide mode and paint the same stroke. Note the difference.
3. Use a stencil in Ruler mode to draw one straight edge and one ellipse freehand.
4. Pin your own photo as a Reference Image and Alt-click three colours out of it into your brush.
5. Paint a small still life or landscape, roughly A5 at 300 ppi, on at least three named layers, using the oils from L23 for texture.
6. Save as L25-bridge.ptg.
7. Use File > Export As Image and choose PSD to write L25-bridge.psd beside it.
8. Open the PSD in Photoshop. Check that your layers, their names and their blend modes all survived.
9. In Photoshop, add a Curves or Levels adjustment layer and one Solid Color fill layer set to Soft Light at low opacity, exactly as in L19.
10. Save the Photoshop version as a separate file. Do not overwrite the .ptg.

Done when: Three files exist with the same base name: a .ptg master, an exported .psd, and a Photoshop file with adjustment layers on top. Every layer you made in ArtRage is present and correctly named in Photoshop, and no stencil or tracing image appears anywhere in the exported image.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

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