Insight Create Intense Colored Strokes with the Oils Brush in Corel Painter By Jeremy Sutton Dateline: January 18, 2006 Version: Corel Painter IX More Insight articles
This tutorial shows some of the effects offered by the Artists’ Oils brush. (Don't have Painter? Download the free, fully functional trial version available from Corel.com.) These brushes are designed to mix colors within the brush stroke, inspired by the behavior of real oil paint. The creative principal shared here is the notion of generating variations from an original source photograph and mixing those variations to generate a final composite image. The variations are generated by using three different restrictions on color. Feel free to try different brush variants from those suggested here.
	Open a photograph in Painter. Choose File > Clone, then choose Artists’ Oils > Blender Bristle. Start painting over the clone copy image using colors picked from the Colors palette. As you select colors, keep the value indicated by the V of the HSV values (listed in the lower right of the Colors palette) at about 50% by keeping the cursor halfway up in the Saturation/Value triangle. Choose any color from the Hue Ring and any level of intensity and saturation. Try to keep the overall sense of form in the composition by keeping the color value at 50% when choosing the color and saturation amount. Save the resulting image.
	Go back to the original photograph. Make another clone copy (File > Clone), and choose Artists’ Oils > Bristle Brush. Now fill the clone copy with brush strokes, using any hue with any value, but with Saturation fixed at about 50%. Try using other brushes from Artists’ Oils, such as Clumpy Brush, as you work on this variation. Save the resulting file.
	Once again, go back to the original photograph. Make another clone copy (File > Clone). Choose Artists’ Oils > Blender Bristle. Choose a hue in the Hue Ring. Now fill the clone copy with brush strokes, staying with that one hue, but using any value and saturation. Save the image.
	With your three variations open in Painter, go back to the original photograph. Make another clone copy (File > Clone). Choose Cloners > Soft Cloner. Set the Clone Source to be one of the three variations to clone it into the clone copy image. Now change Clone Source to a different variation, and clone that into other portions of the image. Do likewise with the third variation. Fill the composite image with cloned brush strokes from any of the three variations, and save the file.
	To add a painted border, select All (Command/Ctrl-A) and choose Select > Float to make a layer of the image. Select the background canvas in the Layers palette and choose Canvas > Canvas Size. Add a suitable number of pixels to all sides (depending on how large you want the border). Choose an Artists’ Oils brush. Paint into the border, choosing colors from the fi nal image using the Option/Alt key to turn your cursor into an eyedropper. Select the layer in the Layers palette. Choose Effects > Object > Create Drop Shadow, and click OK. Choose a color for the outline, and select Canvas > Set Paper Color. Choose Canvas > Canvas Size, and add a small border of that color. The finished image is shown at left.

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Jeremy Sutton, portrait artist and author, teaches and lectures internationally. He has most recently authored Painter IX Handbook: Digital Artist’s Handbook and Painter IX Simplified for Photographers, a four-DVD tutorial set. Visit PainterCreativity.com to learn about his books and classes and JeremySutton.com to see his artwork.