Turning Other Brushes into Cloners

Corel Painter offers two ways to get other brushes to act like Cloners:

• using the Clone Color option
• switching to the Cloning method

Using Clone Color

You can turn almost any brush into a Cloner with the Clone Color option. Clone Color causes a brush to pick up color from the source image, while staying true to its own stroke nature. The Clone Color option is useful for creating mosaics and tessellations based on source imagery.

To use Clone Color

1. Choose Window menu > Show Colors to display the Colors palette.

If the Colors palette is not expanded, click the palette arrow.

2. Click the Clone Color button .

• Be sure you reselect Clone Color if you change brushes while cloning imagery.

Brush Loading

For greater color accuracy while cloning, use brush loading. This causes the brush to pick up individual colors in different regions of the brush dab.

Without Brush Loading, the Clone Color option uses a single, averaged color from the source for each brush dab. This results in an approximation of the original. You can use the Clone Color option without Brush Loading to create an artistic impression of the source.

To enable the Brush Loading option

1. On the Stroke Designer page of the Brush Creator, choose Well.
2. Enable the Brush Loading option.

Cloning Method

You can turn almost any brush into a Cloner variant by setting its method to Cloning in the Brush Creator, and choosing the cloning method subcategory appropriate to the intended media style.

Because the cloning methods use a full set of pixels from the original document for each brush dab, you get a truer copy of the original than you might using the Clone Color option. Unlike using Clone Color, using the cloning methods preserves the original image texture in the clone. Cloning methods are good to use when you want to precisely re-create portions of a source image.

Here's a brief description of the cloning method subcategories. For a more in-depth discussion of these methods, refer to "Methods and Subcategories".

• Hard Cover Cloning - Results in partially anti-aliased brush strokes that hide underlying strokes.
• Soft Cover Cloning - Produces anti-aliased brush strokes that cover layered ones.
• Grainy Hard Cover Cloning - Works like Hard Cover Cloning, but brush strokes also interact with paper grain.
• Grainy Soft Cover Cloning - Works like Soft Cover Cloning, but brush strokes also interact with paper grain.
• Drip Cloning - Pushes color around as if it were wet, cloning the original with distortions based on your stroke.

Fine-tuning the Cloning Methods

You can customize and fine-tune cloning methods in the Brush Creator.

To adjust a cloning method

1. On the Stroke Designer page of the Brush Creator, choose Random.
2. Modify the sliders and options to change the character of the variant:

• Move the Jitter slider to the right to determine the amount of randomness in the brush stroke.
• Choose an expression from the Expression pop-up menu to vary the brush stroke.
• Move the Direction slider to adjust the angle value of the Direction control.
• Move the Variability slider to the right to soften brush strokes. This works best with bristle brushes, creating an impressionistic effect.
• Move the Variability slider a bit to the right and the How Often slider to the left to give drawing tools a "sketchy" feel.
• Random Clone Source makes the cloning method randomly pick up pieces from the source document. What you get with your brush is random snippets of the source image.
• Random Brush Stroke Grain makes the cloning methods randomly pick up texture from the current paper grain.