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Rangefinder
Magazine Corel Painter Inside and Out by Karen Sperling Painting isn’t just for artists anymore.
Photographers don’t easily accept the idea of using Painter to paint from their photographs because they believe a person is either an artist or is not. But the truth is, with some art knowledge, some Painter training and some practice, you, too, can paint fluidly in Painter. The first step to painting in Painter is being able to identify the differences between a photograph and a painting. Those distinctions have to do with art concepts.
The next question is, how do you choose colors? A lot of factors go into the answer, including mood, tones and color theory. One color scheme tip you can use right away is to choose contiguous colors, that is, colors next to each other on the color wheel (see page 26). 
If you look at the color wheel (figure 3) you’ll see that I used contiguous colors, starting with red-orange and going around the color wheel including orange, yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green and blue-green. As for knowing where to paint these colors, I experimented using Express in Image. Here’s how: Next, make the clone a grayscale image so that you can add new colors to it. Here’s how: Next you’ll choose colors and add them to the image: You now have a two-point gradient that you can see in the Gradients palette preview. Next, add some more colors by choosing Gradients palette menu icon (the little arrow in the upper right-hand corner)>Edit Gradient. The Edit Gradient dialog box appears. You can add colors from the Colors palette while the Edit Gradient dialog box is open. To add a color to the gradient: To change another triangle’s color, click it, then choose a color in the Colors palette. Dragging the triangles in the Edit Gradient dialog changes the colors’ ratios to one another. To delete a color, click on its triangle and press delete (backspace on PC). All changes appear in the Gradients palette preview. I used contiguous colors from red-orange to green going around the wheel. (I added blue-green later as an afterthought while painting.) When done, click OK to close the Edit Gradient dialog.
Next you’ll apply these colors to the grayscale image: To experiment with different color combinations, first choose Edit>Undo. Then try different colors in the Edit Gradient dialog, then apply Express in Image again.
Using Express in Image is a nice shortcut to painting. It gives you your basic colors, or an underpainting as it’s known in art terms. The rest is basically touch up. Once I was satisfied with the combination of colors, I was ready to paint (figure 5).
First I resized the original and clone so they were next to each other on the monitor (figure 6). Then I chose Canvas>Tracing Paper (Cmd T, Ctrl T on a PC), which shows the original photo as a non-printing 50 percent ghost of the original. As you paint you can use tracing paper as your guide, turning it on and off to see your progress. Eventually, when you have a lot of paint, it’s hard to see the tracing paper, so I use the photo next to the image for reference.
Then I painted, using the contiguous colors color scheme. By the way, when talking of contiguous colors on the wheel, I mean color families. You can use all different tones or shades of the same color. For instance, I have a range of red-orange from very dark on the roofs to very light at the horizon.
I used the Artists’ Impressionist variant to paint textured strokes on the palm tree trunks and for the shrubs. If you turn down the Resat. slider on the Property Bar, the strokes blend more. I used the Sumi-e Wet Bristle Sumi-e 20 variant to paint the tops of the palm trees and the grass in the planters (figure 7).
I painted the house, beach and stepped planters by first adding color with the Chalk’s Square Chalk 35 variant and then smudging with the Blenders’ Smudge variant. I then painted with the Impressionist variant to add some texture in the sand (figure 8).
I painted the sky and ocean using the Airbrushes’ Digital Airbrush with a low opacity and a large size in the Property Bar. I added some texture with the Impressionist variant (figures 9 and 10). In the final stages, I darkened some areas using the Photo’s Burn variant and lightened others with the Photo’s Dodge variant. I lightened the house, for instance, so it would stand out, making it clearly the subject (figure 11).
Artist and author Karen Sperling is the original Painter expert. She wrote the manuals for the first several versions of Painter and published several Painter books. She currently publishes Artistry Painter tutorials on CDs and as downloadable files. Sperling has taught and demo’d Painter since its debut in 1991, and now leads Artistry Corel Painter 8 Retreats, where she teaches photographers art concepts and Painter procedures for turning photos into paintings. Her commissioned portraits and her paintings are held in private collections internationally. To see more examples of her art and for information about her tutorials and retreats, visit www.artistrymag.com/.
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Thanks to Corel Painter, photographers can now offer their clients painted portraits in addition to photographic ones.
Many photographers guess the difference between a photo and a painting is brush strokes, but photos and painting have many other differences. For example, one of the principle art concepts I discuss in my Artistry Corel Painter Retreats is the importance of choosing a color scheme. 
The colors are random in photos, even if shot in the studio. You have no control over the colors in the landscapes you photograph, and in the studio, even if you color coordinate the subjects’ outfits with the background, faces will still have random colors. In a painting, even in the face of a portrait, the colors are carefully chosen by the artist as part of a color scheme.
To the left on this page 
is a photo I took in Manhattan Beach, CA, and the painting I painted from it in Corel Painter.
Now you see how just one art concept, painting with contiguous colors on the color wheel, can make the difference between a photo and a painting. There are a lot more of these art concepts, and certainly more Painter tools! But this tutorial should help convince you that you, too, can be painting paintings in Painter! 