In Corel® Painter™ IX, the brush variants in the Cloners category behave like other brushes, except that they pick up color from a clone source instead of from the Colors palette. These variants recreate the source imagery while effectively filtering it, reproducing the image in an artistic style, such as pastel chalk or watercolor. To expand your creativity, you can turn almost any brush into a cloner by using either the Clone Color button or by selecting a Cloning method in the Brush Creator.

Using the Clone Color button
The Clone Color button causes a brush to pick up color from the source image while retaining its own stroke qualities.

Before using the Clone Color button, you must choose a source image. You can use any image that you can open in Corel Painter—just ensure that the image you choose is activated as the clone source. To do this, open the image that you want to use as the clone source, and choose File menu > Clone Source. A check mark next to the title of your image indicates that the image is the active clone source.

1. Choose Window menu > Show Colors to display the Colors palette.
   
   If the Colors palette is not expanded, click the palette arrow.
   
   
2. Click the Clone Color button (see below).
   
   

If you change brushes while cloning images, you must click the Clone Color button again.

Using Brush Loading with the Clone Color button
For greater color accuracy while cloning, you can use the Brush Loading option. This causes the brush to pick up individual colors in different regions of the brush dab.

Without Brush Loading, the Clone Color option uses a single, averaged color from the source for each brush dab, which results in an approximation of the original. You can use the Clone Color button without Brush Loading to create an artistic impression of the source.

1. Choose Window menu > Brush Creator.
2. On the Stroke Designer page of the Brush Creator, choose Well.
3. Enable the Brush Loading check box.

Choosing a cloning method
The second way to turn almost any brush into a cloner is to set the method to Cloning in the Brush Creator and then choose the Cloning method subcategory appropriate to the intended media style.

Because the cloning methods use a full set of pixels from the original document for each brush dab, they produce a truer copy of the original than that produced by the Clone Color button. Unlike the Clone Color option, the cloning methods preserve the original image texture in the clone. Cloning methods are useful when you want to precisely re-create portions of a source image.

• Hard Cover Cloning results in partially anti-aliased brush strokes that hide underlying strokes.
• Soft Cover Cloning produces anti-aliased brush strokes that cover layered ones.
• Grainy Hard Cover Cloning works like Hard Cover Cloning, but brush strokes also interact with paper grain.
• Grainy Soft Cover Cloning works like Soft Cover Cloning, but brush strokes also interact with paper grain.
• Drip Cloning pushes color around as if it were wet, cloning the original with distortions based on your stroke.

1. Choose a brush from the Brush Selector bar.
2. Choose Window menu > Brush Creator.
3. On the Stroke Designer page of the Brush Creator, choose Random.
4. Modify the sliders and options to change the character of the brush variant:
   
   • Move the Jitter slider to the right to determine the amount of randomness in the brush stroke.
   • Choose an expression from the Expression pop-up menu to vary the brush stroke.
   • Move the Direction slider to adjust the angle value of the direction control.
   • Move the Variability slider to the right to soften brush strokes. This slider works best with bristle brushes, creating an impressionistic effect.
   • Move the Variability slider a bit to the right, and the How Often slider to the left, to give drawing tools a "sketchy" feel.
   • Enable the Random Clone Source check box to let your brush pick up random snippets of the source image. This option is not available for all Brush categories.
   • Enable the Random Brush Stroke Grain check box to let your brush randomly pick up texture from the current paper grain. This option is not available for all Brush categories.