Clever Auto Painting With Corel Painter

by Jane Conner-ziser

Most traditional painters start their compositions by creating an under painting, or simple blended blocks of color and value, to set the balance of tones and the locations of the objects within the confines of the canvas. Then, they begin adding colors and blending them, starting with larger brushes and heavy blending in areas outside the focal points and finishing with fine detail brushes that are only slightly blended in the focal point areas.

Some areas of paintings are primarily “busy work”. Plain backgrounds just need some added color and a blend of repetitive strokes. Thick leaves are not usually painted one by one, but represented by colors and strokes of a repetitive nature to suggest the shapes of leaves.

Painter has a great function for getting the busy work of paintings out of the way so you can concentrate on and spend more time on the more important aspects of the piece. Auto painting is accomplished by recording your own strokes and then auto-playing them back on your painting. With just a little bit of attention and practice, you will be impressed with the results. It won’t look like a filter effect nor will it look computer generated, and it will save you a lot of time.

Here’s how it works:

Example one will be a painted backdrop. Open the file you wish to paint, clone it (File/Clone) and mount the clone image (PC is Control Auto paint M and Mac is Command M). Then, select the area you want to paint using Painter’s lasso tool (nested with the rectangular marquee). I feather my selections about five pixels (Select/Feather). Then I choose a brush to add accent colors with. For this project it doesn’t matter very much which brush I choose because it will all be blended together. I’m going to use Artist/Impressionist for this example.

Choose two or three colors to add to the background, keeping the value of the colors similar to the overall value of the background. I like to add cool colors behind the subject and include a delicate warm accent as well.

Now we just have to blend it in. Choose a blender from the Blender category. Experiment with them and find ones that you like. Most photographers are partial to the grainy water, the smudge and the smear variants, but you might like one of the others better – you can even try some of the variants in the Distortion or F-X categories. For the article I am going to use the grainy water variant of the Blender Category. I will set the size to 6 pixels and the opacity to 40 percent. Now it’s time to record a stroke. Auto paint

Auto paint Practice a few strokes to get the feel of how the paint is going to move and when you’re comfortable, go to the “more options” arrow (far right corner on the Brush Selector window), scroll down to “record stroke”. The next stroke you make will be recorded. I’m going to make a wiggly stroke (shown in white paint, but recorded in grainy water).

Now, go back to the more options arrow and scroll down to Auto Playback. When you click on it, Painter will begin to repeat your stroke within your selected area. It will continue to paint until you stop it by clicking inside your marching ants selection. Watch the painting process and stop it when the colors you added are nicely blended in. Don’t let it blend too long or the colors will disappear and you will not like the results. I stopped mine at this point: Auto paint

Auto paint

Notice that the auto painting has pulled in some of the “paint” from the areas outside my marching ant selection. That’s OK because I’m going to finish the background by adding some of my own strokes anyway and I will blend it all in together. The finished background looks like this:

Auto paint

And my finished painting looks like this:

Auto paint

For the sample on leaves, I used these brushes:

Cloners/melt cloner to auto paint inside a selection I made for the top background and then I inverted the selection and used Clones/smeary bristle, and Oils/flat oils 10 for the foreground. With each of these brushes I made sure that the option to clone color from the source image was selected. I recorded a stroke, auto played it back and then recorded a different stroke with a different brush and auto played it back. Finishing touches were added with the Palette Knife/palette knife.

Auto paint

The key to making auto painting successful is to use it inside selections and to mix up the sizes and shapes of strokes within the selections. If you don’t, the work will look computer generated because it won’t appear that you tried to mimic the sizes and shapes of the original picture elements. Adding your own random strokes at the end complete the illusion of hand painting and allow you to overlap the individual selected areas while working them into the more heavily hand painted areas of your painting.

Auto painting in Painter is a valuable tool for a professional artist as well as being fun to use. It produces a professional result with your own hand painted strokes while saving a lot of time in production. I like using it to get the repetitive painting out of the way so I can concentrate on the fine details of my art, I think you will find it to be a valuable tool for your art as well.

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Photo Quote: Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. - Berenice Abbott American Photographer, 1898-1991