Some brushes only paint on the canvas—is this normal?

[Sampster]

I would've expected to find multiple posts about this issue, but I didn't several searches and came up empty. If this has already been discussed my apologies.

There are some brushes in painter X that only work when I have the canvas selected (meaning I can't work with these brushes in layers). Is this the way the brush is meant to be, or are there ways for me to fix this? Right now I'm having the issue with the oil pencil, the 'big wet luscious' brush, and the Sargent brush—to name a few. Is there any way to change the settings on these brushes so I can use them in layers? They're amazing, fun brushes but it's a pain to have to flatten my image to play with them when I'm not sure if I'll want to get re-edit a background later.

[Mindflaw]

Is this the way the brush is meant to be

Yes


...it's something about how some brushes has to interact with the "pic" in order to work correctly. ie try to paint with a brush working in an empty layer then paint over the paint with ie the Sargent brush and it will interact with that paint, but if the layers empty there´s nothing for the Sargent brush to interact with.

[ManaBurn]

You can use the paint bucket to fill a layer and then use those brushes to paint on the filled layer. Weird right?

[Jin]

I would've expected to find multiple posts about this issue, but I didn't several searches and came up empty. If this has already been discussed my apologies.

It's been discussed many times, but unless you know the keywords to use in a search, it's pretty hard to find the threads.

There are some brushes in painter X that only work when I have the canvas selected (meaning I can't work with these brushes in layers).

There are at least a couple of reasons why this happens:

One is a known bug in Painter X and Painter X.1 (and I vaguely recall someone saying they experienced it in Painter IX through IX.5). That bug amounts to Preserve Transparency being enabled when it would appear it's disabled because there's no check mark in the Preserve Transparency box in the upper left corner of the Layers palette.

Solution: Click in that box until a check mark appears, then click once more to remove it and disable Preserve Transparency.

Is this the way the brush is meant to be, or are there ways for me to fix this? Right now I'm having the issue with the oil pencil, the 'big wet luscious' brush, and the Sargent brush—to name a few. Is there any way to change the settings on these brushes so I can use them in layers? They're amazing, fun brushes but it's a pain to have to flatten my image to play with them when I'm not sure if I'll want to get re-edit a background later.

Another time when we can't paint on transparent areas of a Layer is when the brush variant we're using is set to Method: Plug-in (check the Brush Controls' General palette to see what Method a brush variant uses).

Among the brush variants you mentioned, these are the only two that use Method: Plug-in and need existing color in order to work:

• Big Wet Luscious
• Artists' Sargent Brush

I am not able to find a brush variant in the default Painter X Painter Brushes library named "oil pencil". If you mean either of the following brush variants both work on the Canvas and on transparent areas of a Layer, so the cause of your problem is most likely the Preserve Transparency bug described above, along with the solution:

• Colored Pencils' Oily Colored Pencil (sizes 3, 5, and 7), or
• Pencils' Oily Variable Pencil

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