Cloning Techniques in Painter IX

Tutorial: Page (2) of 3 - 01/24/05

Cloning Techniques in Painter IX Working with photos to create painterly effects with depth Painting: Roughing out the image
So now it's time to start painting. We're going to accomplish our paint effect over the course of several passes, meaning that we're going to brush our image onto the canvas several times using different brush settings. For the first pass, Simply drag your brush all over your canvas, covering all of the area you wish to use. In my case, that means I'm going to cover the entire canvas with brush strokes, but you can choose to use only a portion of the canvas (say a vignette, for example). Use fast, long strokes to bring color and texture to the canvas.

Now adjust the "Jitter" parameter of your brush so that your brush strokes will not look so random. Bring it down to, say, a value of 1.0, and go over the area of interest in your image a bit more slowly this time.

Then, once again, turn down the Jitter a bit, this time to about 0.25, and go over your image again, following the contours of your subject and also brushing over some of the rougher areas of the image to tone down the random impasto effect.

Painting: bringing in detail
So now we have a decent base for our image, one with the texture and depth you'd expect from paint strokes. But it's time to bring in some detail into the image. To do this, we're going to crank down the base size of our brush significantly. How small you make your brush will depend on the initial size of your image. In my case, I'm bringing the size down to about 10. I'm also bringing the jitter down to 0.

And then I'm going to paint slowly and lightly over the areas that need the most detail--the face and hair, primarily. The reason I'm painting lightly is that I don't want too much impasto in the bristles of my stroke in these areas. And the reason I'm painting slowly is that it allows me to clone with greater detail from the original image. (This is owing to the "How Often" setting we've assigned in the Random palette. The slower we draw, the more often the original image will be picked up in the cloning process over the course of the stroke, thus bringing in more detail.)

As I paint, I'm going to follow the contours of the areas of interest in the painting--the contours of the subject, as well as the areas that contain the most detail.

Then I'll reduce the brush size even further (down to 2 or 3, in my case) and trace over some of the areas of finer detail, such as hair and various elements of my subject's dress.

And that's about as much detail as I'm going to be able to bring in with an impasto brush on an image this size. So now it's time to add in some finishing touches via Painter's effects.

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