With Mirror painting, every stroke you make is copied onto the opposite side of your canvas. It's the most natural way to show your unique personality and style. For even more impact, use revolutionary Particle Brushes to add details like hair or fur with ease. The photo-painting and cloning tools are unmatched, transforming your photos into impressionist, oil and watercolor masterpieces. It's easy to be amazing with award-winning Natural-Media brushes, and time-saving painting tools like Mirror and Kaleidoscope that let you create one-of-a-kind art with just a few strokes. My tablet also came with a free 30-day trial to and you know I’ll be all over that! Very exciting.Corel Painter Essentials 5 is specially designed for art enthusiasts and emerging photo artists who want to go beyond ordinary and turn everyday inspiration into seriously impressive art.

It allows you to use touch gestures (replacing the neat zoom circle I had on my Bamboo tablet I bought seven years ago), but I find I accidentally rotate when I mean to zoom, so I’ll have to find a way to disable rotate! Lots to get used to, so for now I’ve been using the switch to turn the touch feature off. They’re different from what I was used to in Corel Painter Essentials 4 and I’m having a hard time finding either a list of the new shortcuts or a way to map the shortcuts I want.

Speaking of which, I’m having trouble with the keyboard shortcuts.

The Van Gogh is cool because it changes colors with each new stroke – looks like four colors is the limit, unless I can customize it further. (The included software is what makes the “Art” different from the “Draw”, “Comic”, and “Photo”.) Today I went through all the brushes to see which ones I will probably use.

Soooooo I got a new Intuos tablet from Wacom (whoo hoo!) and the “Art” tablet comes with a sort-of-free download of Painter Essentials 5.

Painter essentials 5