LadySilverMage (and anyone else interested, of course):

Thanks for the compliment on the suit. =)

Here are some tips for working with Painter. First, with regular Painter (NOT Painter 3D, which comes with Poser and is horrible), you paint on a texture map. I have JUST the item I am texturing open in Poser and Painter open with the template. I save interim images as JPGs and hit render in Poser to see how my changes look. Anyway, on to the tips:

1. Absolutely exlore some of the alternative materials, brushes, nozzles, and other things available on the second CD, PARTICULARLY in the WEB directory. There is a nice colletion of burlaps and cottons and such in the WEB/patterns library on that second CD. I used these materials for the Shania suit.

2. Understand the difference between CLONER brushes and regular brushes. Cloners are the most useful for texturing, and here is how to use them:

a: Open your template.
b: Select the white area OUTSIDE the mesh template using the magic wand.
c: Invert the selection and hide the marquee so it doesn't get in your way.
d: Make a new layer.
e: In the BRUSHES palette, change to the CLONER brushes and start with the "straight cloner" to see how it works.
f: In the PATTERNS palette, load a pattern from the CD (try the fabrics patterns in the WEB section, they are fantastic).
g: Begin painting. Voila, you are painting with a tiling texture.

Now, the great thing is that if you paint each clothing part on a separate layer, you can change the colors easily by adjusting hue or using tinting (either in painter or photoshop, whichever is easier for you.) So even if your pattern is purple, it doesn't matter because you can change that pattern to any other color later. It's really the TEXTURE that you care about, not necessarily the colors. I just happened to find colors I liked already in the patterns libraries on the second CD for this particular suit.

It is important to note that ANY brush can be made into a cloner if you change the Brush "Method" to clone. You can clone anything, even stuff that ISN'T in your pattern library, by using tracing papers and other features of Painter, but I am not an expert at using these techniques yet.

You can find some decent Painter resources at this URL: http://www.portrayals.com/resources.html and I also joined the Painter mailing list in order to read some of the archives to figure out what the heck I am doing.

Painter is frustrating, but as I discovered recently, extremely powerful.