Today we’ll take a quick look at Region Draw Pen Mode. You can use Region Draw Pen Mode to automatically generate different different hatching patterns that fill an interactively specified ellipse or rectangular area of the canvas. A few of the different hatching pattern options are shown above.
The paint synthesizer has a number of different pen modes. Each pen mode has a unique way of drawing based on the movement of the drawing pen (or mouse cursor). The Pen Mode is specified in the paint synthesizer’s Pen Mode control panel.
When manually drawing in Region Draw Pen Mode, when you initially mouse down in the canvas and then move the cursor you interactively pull out a red region path. The region will be a rectangular or elliptical area that is filled in with a hatching pattern. You can see in the 2nd gallery image above that my mouse movement is specifying a red rectangle filled with a cross hatching pattern. When I let up on the mouse button the red region hatching path is then painted in (3rd gallery image above).
Region Draw Pen Mode lets you work at a higher level to generate hatching patterns. You interactively specify the overall region shape, rotation, and positioning. The paint synthesizer then automatically paints in the region with the appropriate hatching pattern automatically for you.
The Region Fill Type parameter has a large number of different hatching pattern option you can choose from (4th gallery image above). Each of these fill types specifies a different hatching pattern to fill the region and associated region shape (ellipse, rectangle or triangle).
The Region Spacing parameter specifies the number of pixels between hatch marks in the Region Fill Type hatching pattern.
The Region Specifier parameter determines how the overall region shape is interactively specified. If you are working with a Wacom tablet you can use pen pressure to pen tilt to interactively specify the width of the region while you are drawing it out with the pen. If you are working with a mouse or pen you can specify the length, rotation, and positioning of a region by you movement of the cursor while drawing the region.
The Lasso option for the Region Specifier allows you to interactively draw in a red freestyle lasso region, that is then automatically filled in with the region fill hatching patten when you release the mouse button. You can see this in the 5th and 6th gallery images above.
If you hold down the t key while drawing in a region shape, then you can use your mouse or pen movement to translate the existing region shape. As opposed to the normal behavior of pulling out or rotating the region. When you release the t key then your cursor movement will again change the rotation of sizing of the translated region.
The Region Effect parameter options allow for some additional hatching pattern variation by applying a path modification effect to the automatically generated hatching pattern.
The best way to get a feel for all of the different options available with Region Draw Pen Mode is to try manually drawing with the different Region Fill Type options. If you have a pen and tablet try switching between pressure and tilt Region Specifiers to interactively control the region width. The paint preset used in today’s example is available 81411.paint
The Region AutoDraw parameter determines what happens when you auto-paint with a Region Draw Pen Mode paint preset (by auto-paint we mean pressing the Action button). The Normal option reverts or normal interactive pen auto-painting. So individual paint strokes are drawn as opposed to regions filled with hatching patterns. The Simulate Masked Lasso Fill uses the auto-paint process to automatically generate a lasso region from the initial automatically generated paint path, and then fill in that lasso region with the region fill hatching pattern. The Simulate Fill option uses the nitial automatically generated paint path to specify a region area that is then filled in with the region fill hatching pattern. So Simulate Fill most closely reproduces the appearance of manual painting in Region Draw Pen Mode when auto-painting via the Action button.
The 3 gallery images above shows what you get when you auto-paint by pressing the Action button for each of the 3 Region AutoDraw parameter options (Normal, Simulate Masked Lasso Fill, and Simulate Fill).
