A digital tool, Corel Photo-Paint

I was just to close down my laptop to run out and sit at a café and work a little. And then it hit me again: why haven’t all illustrators and artist´s found the great tool to draw with – Corel Photo-Paint. Maybe because Adobe Photoshop have such a huge market, penetrating all illustrators out there. Because seriously its not because Corel Photo-Paint would be inferior in drawing and illustrating with. Just hook up a wacom tablet and start Corel Photo-Paint and you are on. Look at this illustration of mine I made for an airline magazine, It takes up a whole page of the magazine, and tell me it would be easier to draw in Photoshop than in Corel Photo-Paint, or that the quality would be different. And look at this other illustration I made for a magazine in Sweden. I took a photo with my digital camera, and image adjusted the light bulb, and then just started to directly draw with my wacom tablet pen using Corel Photo-Paint.

Working both as an artist and illustrator I really have a lot of help using Photo-Paint. I image adjust my acrylic paintings before they are put into CorelDRAW and placed in a catalog I make myself, containing samples of my work. And all though I really use my sketchbook and sketching on ideas for acrylic paintings, I sometimes use Corel Photo-Paint to make sketches and drafts. It have help´t me a lot in making promotional materials, that I as well as other artists need when communicating and presenting our selves.

And I really try to not sound like a sales person for Corel Photo-Paint, but when I consider the amount people pay for Photoshop, which is a great software no doubt, when they can get so much more for their money buying CorelDRAW graphic suite. When I first bought my very first Coreldraw graphic suite in the late 90´s people said almost like a mantra: ”dude you just HAVE to have a MAC computer and Photoshop and illustrator if you are gonna work professional, because all your clients have it.”

That sounded to me at the time, and still does, like when I was 16 years old, when´t into the art supplies store and asked for a brush to paint with oil paint with. They only presented me to a certain brush – the most expensive. And then said ”this is the ONLY brush you can use to paint with oil painting. Just plain stupid.

Stefan Lindblad
Artist & Illustrator