Some thoughts about Painter...
I've both used and taught Painter for many years. As someone who spent the first years of his professional career using traditional media such as acrylics, watercolor, and airbrush, Painter was the first computer program I learned, even before a word processor. It immediately appealed to me with its natural media emulation, and clearly I was its target audience. It became the reason I bothered to learn how to use a computer.
I've taught it to hundreds of students over the years, although I don't so much "teach" it as introduce it. I work with art students who in many cases are looking to transfer their traditional skills to the computer. Of course these days many have grown up with digital media, but I still find students who dislike the computer because they feel it imposes it's own mechanical look on artwork.
In my opinion Painter remains the 2D graphics program that best overcomes this perceived limitation. In one session many folks who are accustomed to drawing with pencil or pen find they can begin to get their "look" quickly and without the sense of distance that one sometimes feels when working in say a vector graphics program.
I use a couple of other programs in my professional work, but Painter remains my favorite. Here is a pair of images I did to promote Saturday art classes for elementary and high school students at our college. The first one was painted traditionally with acrylics, while its sequel was done several years later primarily in Painter. As I like to point out to my students, the computer doesn't change who you are as an artist - it doesn't think for you, make design decisions, or necessarily dictate your sense of color or drawing style.
