Feature: Corel's Painter IX has one of the best natural media
Motivation: This Olympic How-to highlights Painter's Quick Clone and Cloner tools

There has been a long simmering debate as to whether photography is art despite the likes of Steiglitz, Adams, Weston, Cartier-Bresson, Bullock and many others. Perhaps Georgia O'Keefe and Man Ray, who used both media would have settled the question - but the issue persists to this day.

However, the emergence of digital images and the unbelievably adept photofinishing tools available to designers and artists makes the question pretty moot. I see designers, sculptors and artists using many media including images together in their compositions. A sculpture of the goddess Venus built from layers of clay, chicken wire and multiple images stacked and blended for effect. Collages and surface paintings primarily of images but bound by bold paint strokes. And then simple image collages with the paint media and strokes being done right in the photo-finishing software. It is this latter method that will be shown here.

Original Image

The original image from the Yahoo Olympic Games photo highlights is from the Czech versus Finland hockey game. A little light checking is being applied. The original image is quite good - and that is what made it attractive. See if our clone image could catch some of the drama of the action with a bit of artistic flare. It is not a trivial challenge.

Corel Painter has a trace and appropriate clone tools that allow a user to brush the underlying image's colors and texture onto a blank (or colored) canvas. Artists control the texture through brush selection plus several properties including opacity, jitter (dispersion of the stroke), and grain (how much of the underlying pattern's texture or grain is picked up by a stroke). Artists can switch between clone tools(which pick up the underlying colors) and normal art brushes with a simple pulldown selection as show in the screen shot to the left and below.

The choice of artist tools available is very extensive. See our review of Painter here and here for more details on the brushes available. The most important brushes to be aware of are the Liquid Ink and Watercolor brushes which auto-create their own exclusive layers - no other brush works on those layers. However, these special layers can be combined with other layers including merging them and the usual color interactions work as well - the tint of a water color layer will be affected by the colors directly beneath it and vice versa.

My own favorite brush tools are Charcoal, Conte, and Pastels because they are more sensitive to underlying grain and smear more easily - vividly following their natural media counterparts. In this how to I use charcoal most often but also Pastels and Oil Pastels. There are some very subtle interactions between the various strokes - see the Painter help on brushes for extensive guides on how to combine various brushes together and their color and texture interactions.

Finally, if you do not get the precise effects you want with a specific Brush, just enter CTRL+B or Windows | Brush Creator command. This allows users to fine tune the currently selected brush variant. There are at least 8 and as many as 16 major brush properties and then for each property about 5-10 specific controls for each.

In sum it is very easy to shape and refine the brushes used in Corel painter to your exact needs. And these variants can then be saved in your own personal library of brushes. Painter also works very well with Wacom and other specialized tablets and digital stylus devices - so that it responds to the speed, pressure, and special wheel commands and settings as well. Painter is top natural media program. And now with Corel painter Essentials artists can try out the basic program with many of the same cloning tools and capabilities before trading up to full Painter.

Tracing by Quick Clone

The screenshot above shows Corel painter in full tracing mode with the Navigation viewer at the bottom left of the screen which shows a preview of the final image(no image behind it as in the case of the full screen tracing image). To set this up is quite simple in Corel painter.

First just open the image you want use. Resize it if required - in this case the command is Canvas | Resize and then set Width = 700. Then the command is File | Quick Clone. Painter automatically sets the Clone source, changes the brush default to Cloners and you are off t the races. I like to fill in the outlines of a important figures using the cloner brushes like Chalk and Oil Brush Cloner, then fill the broad colored areas by switching to natural media brushes like Pastels and Conte sampling for colors from the Canvas or using the color mixer.

The idea is to switch back and forth between cloner brushes and then natural ones as you slowly paint your image. clicking on the binocular icon in the lower left corner brings up the navigation screen which shows the evolving image/painting as seen in the screenshot above.


Here is the first draft on our final image - what we are trying to emphasize is the rough and tumble of the game. Thus the oversized hockey gloves are emphasize. Also note how the faces of the two players have been raked in using a oil cloner brush which we adjusted the rake on and lowered the opacity. Elsewhere the strokes are bold and quick - switching between clone and natural brushes. But this is only the first draft.


Sometimes when you are tracing its hard to remember that you have the full set of Painter commands at your disposal. Here we have taken advantage of the gradient tool and masking and filled in the upper area with a burnt sienna to pewter-shot gradient. It has been done in 3 masking steps across the top of the image. Then using the same burnt sienna color we have hand painted a border around the image. We have deliberately used a wider feather on the masks to taper the gradient into the border and heads of the players. I am still not sure it worked exactly the way I wanted. So we try another approach to the final image.

in this rendition we Undo the last three fill steps and instead fill the whole image with the gradient color. Now some strokes get covered over by the gradient and others - on the 2nd layer hand painted layer do not. the effect is eerie and yet still carries the impact of the game so we add a broader, near scarlet border and settle on this as our final image.

Now if readers get the idea that working with Painter is easy and yet full of creative opportunity, then this tutorial has served its function. Painter allows artists to copy as little or as much of an image as they want. They can do so while adding specific texture and styling with the cloner brushes - or the full set of natural media brushes. It is easy to add more layers and try different effects - and the just undo or delete unwanted layers. And since Painter supports Adobe Plugins and masking it is possible to apply highly targeted effects to an evolving image/painting. In sum, for Photofinishers, Corel Painter IX is the ultimate Paint Finishing tool.