MetaCreations Painter comes with a wide variety of natural media brushes. These traditional artists materials form the core of Painter. They make it easier for an artist to transition from pastels and paintbrushes to their digital equivalents. At the same time, imitating what already exists limits the artist's palette to artistic techniques that have existed for centuries. Fortunately, Painter provides a series of tools that allow brushes to be created from scratch.
Painter's Brush Control menu allows users to design brushes that can either mimic natural media brushes or even develop some that don't exist in nature. It's the latter type of brushes that I like to develop. I don't feel a need to be restricted to standard art materials and find it enjoyable to work with a completely new digital palette of art techniques. Working with entirely new forms of media increases an artist's creative freedom and allows whole new means of generating artistic works.
Even with all the power inherent in Painter's ability to create new brushes, it is still to a degree mired in the need to mimic natural media. There is no control over the dab types (Painter offers six different brush heads). The profiles of those dabs cannot be altered. That's a shame because the dab is the primary means of determining how color is painted onto a canvas.
Below are a few of the brushes that I created for fun.
Star
Brush - Painting with Stars Rainbow
Bubble Brush - Neat Bubble FX