First time user. Some help needed

[mustanglou]

Greeting. I just used the trial version of Black Ink and compared it to other such as CSP, Corel, Art Rage and decided to delete the others in favor of purchasing Black Ink. My reasons were it's simplistic brush selection and not overloaded in features I will never use. Another big reason was the quality of the paints and colors. No matter how much I zoom in it never becomes pixelated and it just makes the pictures so vibrant, The real sale point to me was tutorial #1. It was the first tutorial of all products I tried that I was able to work along with and painted the crab. It taught me many of the features and I completed a painting project that actually turned out good!

I am brand new to digital art so if I could get some help with the following it would be much appreciated.

1) Most importantly. Is there a place to see the Black Ink speed painting much slower, similar to Tutorial 1? I found it extremely rewarding to use the techniques and be able to complete a project while keeping the skills I learned. As I mentioned. I'm new to digital art and a horrible painter so tutorials are helpful.

2) If number 2 isn't available can someone refer me to a source that would be helpful. One that especially uses Black Ink if possible.

3) Is there a way to adjust the contrast of the UI? I am on a 16 inch Cintiq and I can't read what the brushes names are without taking my glasses off and getting real close to it

4) It's nice that the second view lets you move tabs around to where you want them but I can't figure out how to move the part of the UI on the right side of the screen. I'm left handed so it I could get my brush parameters and color selection on the left side of the UI that would be nice.

5) Overall, some of the other programs I tried had far more functions on the screen but somehow I felt I still had plenty of room on my screen. This UI seems to take up so much of the screen but when I use the UI scale to make it smaller I can no longer read what anything is. Is there a solution for this.

6) Are there tutorials on how to make some of the more popular brushes that are used. For example, I was watching the speed painting of Space Opera and the wet ink brush (I think that's what it was) used in the beginning looked real useful for making cloud textures on the screen however my wet ink brush doesn't paint anything like that.

7) Is there a color palette somewhere that has the colors in squares? I found it useful to use for shading and not picking a color too far off the original where using the slider makes changes larger than I intended

Just for feedback. I don't know if I'm alone in this but I find the layers difficult to work with. It took me hours to figure out how to import a image to trace onto another layer while other programs I figured it out immediately. Not sure why but the layers don't feel very intuitive to some new.

Thanks for your product and keep up the good work. Can't wait to see what you guys do next.

[mustanglou]

Well last night I successfully recreated the lightening speed painting. It took hours of pausing and zooming trying to make changes to brushes (especially the hay brush) but I think I got it real close. I'd love to know what changes the artist made to the hay bush to make it less chaotic.
Can someone tell me if I make changes to a brush and save it with a new name will it overwrite the default brush or make a second copy keeping the original? I've been afraid a saving changes as I don't want to lose the defaults.

[u2bleank]

quick answer : don't worry you can't overwrite default brushes or any default setup in BI.

PS : we will do a more in depth answer as soon as possible

[mustanglou]

Thanks, I took my chances this morning and saw that it didn't overwrite an existing paint brush. I am curious, the wet ink default brush Ben-O uses quite a bit doesn't appear to be one of the brushes created in the program. It seems like a good brush for filling in background. Maybe it is one of the brushes I have bit it's been renamed since most of his work seems to be on a different version. He does some cool sci-fi paintings. Still looking for one I could follow along with. Found a video that has him doing one briefly on Vemeo. Looks like he's using the crepe brush pretty creatively but it's hard to tell since the video doesn't zoom in very well. Looking forward to getting home from work today to try it.

If you know of a good book on basics that doesn't reference Corel or photoshop since Please let me know. If you guys have classes or tutorials for sale that would be great to!

This program has me so into art again!