Creating Digital Pop Art
with Corel® Painter™ IX
by Tanya Lux - Corel Product Specialist

With Corel® Painter IX.5, you can use your own photos to create modern pop art. This tutorial will show you how to transform a photo into digital pop art.

The first step is to select a headshot photo. Preferably, a photo of a singular subject; however, virtually any headshot photo will work. From the File menu, click Open. In the Open (Mac OS®) or Select Image (Windows®) dialog box, locate the photo that you want to use, and click Open.

If necessary, you can crop a photo to achieve a headshot of a singular subject. From the Toolbox, click the Crop tool. Drag the cursor over the area of the photo that you want to keep.

On the Underpainting palette, choose Black and White from the Style pop-up menu, and click Apply. Depending on the contrast of your photo, you may want to increase the contrast. You'll get better results for this tutorial by using a photo with high contrast. If necessary, choose Increase Contrast from the Style pop-up menu, and click Apply.

From the Select menu, choose All, or press Command + A (Mac OS) or Ctrl + A (Windows ). On the Papers palette, click the palette menu arrow, and choose Capture Paper from the pop-up menu.

In the Save Paper dialog box, type a name for the paper in the Save As box. To keep the paper tiles from fading, set the Crossfade slider to 0.

From the Select menu, choose None, or press Command + D (Mac OS) or Ctrl + D (Windows). On the Underpainting palette, click Quick Clone. On the upper-right corner of the drawing window, click the Toggle Tracing Paper button, or press Ctrl + T (Windows) or Command + T (Mac). On the Brush Selector bar, choose Chalk from the Brush Category selector and Square Chalk 35 from the Brush Variant selector. Use the property bar to set the following brush settings:

	Size – 27
	Opacity – 10%
	Grain – 12%
	Resat – 18%

On the Colors palette, use the Hue Ring to set the color to black.

Stroke the canvas with your chalk to reveal the image underneath. The dark areas are the ridges of the paper grains and the chalk picks them up.

On the Papers palette, click the Invert Paper button. This lets you paint the white areas with color and preserves the black areas.

At this point, I continued to toggle this control back and forth while using the Chalk to selectively add color to certain parts of the image. For example, the hair, eyes, lips, skin, and dress. You will need to use the property bar to adjust the size of your Chalk to suit the portion of the image on which you are working.

Next, we'll increase the canvas proportionally. From the Select menu, choose All, then choose Float. On the Layers palette, select the Canvas. From the Canvas menu, choose Canvas Size. In the Current Size area of the Canvas Size dialog box, note the Height and Width dimensions. In the Adjust Size area, type the Height dimension in the Add pixels to bottom box. Then, type the Width dimension in the Add pixels to right box.

On the Layers palette, select Layer 1. Right-click and choose Duplicate from the pop-up menu. Repeat this procedure until you have four layers.

On the Layers palette, select the second Layer 1. From the Toolbox, click the Layer Adjuster tool. On the Canvas, use the Layer Adjuster tool to reposition the image to the right. On the Layers palette, select the third Layer 1 and use the Layer Adjuster tool to reposition the image to the bottom left on the canvas. On the Layers palette, select the fourth Layer 1 and use the Layer Adjuster tool to reposition the image to the bottom right on the canvas.

To finish our modern pop art painting, we'll add color to the background of each image. On the Layers palette, enable the Preserve Transparency check box and select the second Layer 1.

From the Toolbox, click the Brush tool. On the Colors palette, choose a contrasting color with which to brush the background. Repeat this for the remaining three layers.