This is the first in a series of Painter Wow! power-user tips by award-winning artist and author Cher Threinen-Pendarvis. Painter Wow! tips will focus on advanced Corel® Painter™ techniques, artist theory, and concepts. As the developer of hundreds of brushes and other art materials for Corel Painter, Cher will uncover many of its secrets.

Auto-Painting With Custom Stroke Presets
by Cher Threinen-Pendarvis

Auto-Painting is a powerful new feature in Corel® Painter™ IX.5 that allows you to transform photographs into paintings. You can apply automatic strokes that incorporate stroke style, pressure, and direction. Sliders in the Auto-Painting palette let you adjust options such as Pressure, Length, Rotation, and Brush Size to produce the brush strokes you desire. For even more creativity during the Auto-Painting process, you can record your own strokes and use them with the Auto-Painting features.

Step 1. Record and play strokes. Corel Painter IX.5 provides three ways to record a brush stroke and play it back: Playback, Auto Playback, and Auto-Painting. Playback repeats the brush stroke each time you click with your stylus or mouse. Auto Playback repeats the stroke until you turn it off by clicking in the image or by choosing Auto Playback again. Auto-Painting uses recorded strokes to clone a photograph and create a painted look. You can record strokes to use as presets with the powerful Auto-Painting features. If the Auto-Painting palette is not open, choose Window > Show Auto-Painting. This illustration shows the Auto-Painting palette with its default settings.

Step 2. Record a custom stroke for Auto-Painting. When I paint from scratch with conventional pastels, I often use a cross-hatching technique to block in basic color shapes and values into a composition.

You can emulate this hatching process by using Auto-Painting to record a stroke and play it back. Begin by choosing the Variable Oil Pastel variant of Oil Pastels, and then paint a short diagonal stroke with a slight curve. As you can see in the brush stroke image below, I have varied the pressure and used lighter pressure for the lower area of the stroke so that it is partially transparent. The transparency helps later with the paint interaction.

When you have practiced the stroke and are ready to record it, choose Record Stroke from the pop-up menu on the Brush Selector bar, and draw the stroke. Try out the recorded stroke by choosing Playback Stroke, and click to place a stroke. Disable Playback Stroke by choosing it again. Next, save your stroke by choosing Save Stroke from the pop-up menu on the Brush Selector bar. I named my stroke Soft Diagonal.

When you have named and saved your stroke, it appears on the Strokes menu, which is accessible from the pop-up menu on the Brush Selector bar. It also appears on the Stroke pop-up menu on the Auto-Painting palette. Click the Stroke pop-up menu on the Auto-Painting palette to choose your custom stroke style.

Step 3. Rough in strokes with the Auto-Painting features. Open a photograph that has a strong center of interest and good contrast. To make a clone image with a white canvas, click the Quick Clone button on the Underpainting palette. Before applying the Auto-Painting effect, save your clone image with a descriptive name to keep your files organized.

For my source image, I used one of my photographs of Point Loma lighthouse. To process the photo, I used the tools in the Underpainting palette. I used the Edge Effect feature to give it a circular vignette and the Smart Blur feature to simplify the details in the photo. When I used Smart Blur, I set the Amount control at 80.

Now, choose a brush for Auto-Painting. You can use the same brush you used for recording the stroke, or a different one. I chose a Variable Oil Pastel because it performs like a soft oil pastel that smears subtly in a painterly way, and it incorporates Color Variability, which adds interest and expression to the image, making it look handpainted. (Color Variability allows the Hue, Saturation, and Value to vary with each stroke, depending on the settings saved for the brush.) Choose your custom stroke from the pop-up menu on the Underpainting palette, and click the Playback button. (You may need to adjust the sliders to achieve the effect you want.) Now, sit back and watch Painter rough in your image with hatched strokes. You can stop the Auto-Painting process by clicking the Stop button or clicking in the image. Click the Play button again if want to add more strokes. Toggle the Tracing Paper off to view the progress of your image. To turn the Tracing Paper off, choose Canvas > Tracing Paper, or click the Tracing Paper button in the upper-right corner of the Corel Painter image window. As you can see in my illustration below, the basic shapes and colors are roughed in with expressive, hatched strokes.

Step 4. Refine the image. Before adding more paint to your image, look at its composition carefully. Which areas do you want to strengthen? Do you want to focus more attention on the center of interest? After analyzing your image, pick a few important areas or edges to enhance.

I wanted to retain the loose sketchy look, so I used a Square Hard Pastel to paint a few crisper edges and subtly strengthened the focal point. To achieve this, I used the Dropper tool to sample color from the painting and then used a Square Hard Pastel to brighten the highlights on the tower and on some of the roof lines. I also added a few subtle strokes to the foreground plants and to the sky. When I wanted to pick up color from my Clone Source, I enabled the Clone Color button on the Colors palette to turn the brush into a cloner. Then, I touched up the lighthouse tower roof, the lower roof, and wall highlight. Keep in mind that if you restore too much detail, your image will return to the photographic look.

Now that you've worked through this Wow! Auto-Painting tip, experiment with recording more of your own custom stroke styles, and have fun applying them to your images. Happy painting!

Images and content: © 2006 by Cher Threinen-Pendarvis

Cher Threinen-Pendarvis has been widely recognized for her mastery of Corel® Painter™, Adobe® Photoshop®, and the Wacom® tablet and has used these tools since they were first released. Exercising her passion for the artist tools in Corel Painter, she has worked as a consultant and demo-artist for the Corel Painter developers. Her artwork has been exhibited worldwide, and her articles and art have been published in many books and periodicals. Cher teaches Corel Painter and Photoshop workshops around the world, and she is principal of the consulting firm Cher Threinen Design.

Cher is the author of The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book: Creative Techniques in Digital Painting and all seven editions of The Painter Wow! Book. The Painter IX Wow! Book is the latest edition of this highly praised volume of inspiration. To learn more about Cher, visit her Web site at www.pendarvis-studios.com