Corel Painter 2020

Corel Painter 2020 (20.0.0) has been released. With a surprisingly low-key launch. Perhaps it’s been low-key because Painter 2020 seems to be just brush improvements and a few UI changes…

* Brush accelerator. Most useful on huge canvases it seems, if your PC can handle it.

* Graphic-card “enhanced brushing”. Up to 4x speed apparently, depending on graphics card.

* “Improved” brush selector. Now with 900 brushes.

* The User Interface has also changed, yet again.

Brush improvements are not to be sniffed at, since they’re an integral part of Painter’s excellent natural-media blending and bleeding of paints and glazes and suchlike. Many long-time users working on huge canvases with powerful PCs and hefty GPUs will welcome the improvements. But I’m not sure that making some tweaks, mainly to make an antique code-base run a bit faster, justifies a whole new “2020” interation of the software. Especially when the price is £360, and even an upgrade costs £180.

Pepper & Carrot – new website

The Creative Commons Pepper & Carrot comic strips, made with the excellent free Krita software, now have a dedicated new website with all 29 episodes nearly presented…

All the strips are under Creative Commons Attribution.

Incidentally, Krita is now at version 4.2, which despite its .2 is a major update.