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© 2000 by Ruth Huking. All Rights Reserved.
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If you are using Photo-Paint 9, you'll want to download a file containing dialogs appropriate for your version. Note that this is a 146K PDF file. So you must have Adobe Acrobat to view the file. A copy of Acrobat Reader is supplied with Photo-Paint 9.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to take a Symbol picture in CorelDRAW and add the painting touches in PhotoPaint. Figure 1 shows the Building Symbols #43 and #53 and Figure 2 shows the Plant Symbols, #40, and #101. I'm going to assume that you all know to ungroup Symbols before you work on them and group them again when you are finished. I have used the original CorelDRAW palette for this picture with two darker shades of the Forest Green added. I have taken the outlines off most of the objects.
The house is mirrored and the two inside panels stretched down to meet the outside section. Add a door and two windows made with the graph tool. The barn is treated in the same way. The flowerpots are #86 from the Tool Roll Up and the cow is #51 from the Animal 2 Roll Up.
Symbol #40 is a really dumb tree. I don't know what Corel thought we would do with it. If you look at it closely, you can see that it is just a narrow line around the tree with a hollow inside. All you can do with it is to fill the inside of the line. Well, there is a way to make it a better-looking tree. First, ungroup it and delete the two holes in the tree. Then delete all the nodes on the inside of the tree. This will take a little work but when you are finished you will have a tree you can fill. Next fill it with Forest Green and using the knife tool, cut the trunk from the tree and fill it with Dark Brown. After all this trouble, save this tree and stick it some place on your hard drive so you will have it again if you need it. The two other trees are also filled with Forest Green and one is shrunk and stretched. Cut the trunk from the second tree.
The ground and hills are filled with a Custom Linear Fountain Fill. This is just to give you an idea of how the picture will look when it is "painted." The sky is a solid fill of Light Blue Green. Figure 4 shows the Fountain Fill.
Now we are ready to convert everything to bitmaps. Select the sky and the ground areas and click on Bitmaps in the menu bar and Convert to Bitmap. Then click on Bitmaps again and click on Edit Bitmap. Your sky and background will come up in Corel PHOTO-PAINT. Do a Save As and give this file a name and save it as a .cpt file. This file will be your new "painting" in Photo-Paint. Put this file on your Task Bar.
Go back to your CorelDRAW file. I would suggest at this point that you undo your Create to Bitmap so you will still have your original DRAW file. Group your house, flowerpots, flagstones and the two trees by the house. Convert them to Bitmap. Then click on Edit bitmap. They will then come up in Photo-Paint on a new page with a white area around them. Using the Magic Wand, click in all the white areas. Click the + button and you can continue using the Magic Wand. Select Mask | Invert. Then Edit | Cut the houses and trees and Edit | Paste them as a New Object into your new Photo-Paint file. They will be on their own layer and you can size or move them if you need to. Name that layer.
Group the small tree, the barn and the silo. Do the same thing with that group. Then put the cows on their own layer and the two large trees on individual layers. Rename your layers as you make them. You can also drag one layer down or up if they end up in the wrong place. In Figure 5 you can see some of my layers. When the padlock is locked, you can not work on that layer. If you click on the Eye, that layer becomes invisible.
Editor's Note: Figure 5 shows the Objects roll-up from Photo-Paint 7. So if you are using a newer version of Photo-Paint, the Objects Docker will look significantly different.
Now comes the fun part! I like to get some of the "paint" on the background before doing the detail painting. Make all your objects except the sky and foreground invisible by clicking on the Eye. Make sure all those areas are locked (padlocks closed.) Select Edit | Checkpoint. Then Tools | Options and Memory give yourself about 4-5 Undo levels. If you continue to paint now and don't like the results you can Restore your picture to the Checkpoint. If you make just one or two strokes you don't like, you can Undo them. There are other ways to go back and delete strokes, but this works for me.
Editor's Note:In Photo-Paint 8 and 9, select Tools | Options then you'll find Memory under Workspace in the tree list at left.
Let's talk a little about brushes. The most the books tell you is it takes a lot of experimenting, which is absolutely correct. I will show you how to make some brushes and once you understand how to make one brush, the others will make a little more sense. I like to use the Impressionist brushes, but when I first tried them they looked horrible. Through trial and error, I got something that worked for me. Let's start with Corel's first Impressionist brush, which is found under the Palette Knife tool. On the left side of Figure 6 is Corel's version of the brush and on the right side is my version. Each one was done twice using Grass Green for the color.
I liked the idea of having the brush lay down more than one color at a time, but Corel got carried away! Figure 7 shows the comparisons of how the two brushes are set up. I used the same color, Grass Green, and the same size, 50, for both samples. On the first chart of each setting, the Transparency and Soft Edge are very different. In the second chart they are both the same. On the third chart the Spread is different and the numbers under Hue, Saturation and Lightness are different. This last area makes the biggest difference. The size of the brush can vary but the other numbers will stay the same. You can Save a Custom Brush and give it a name. The only thing you might want to change while using it is the size. I sometimes change the Transparency and Softness and it would be easy just to make another Custom Brush.
Editor's Note: Once again these roll-ups are from v7. Photo-Paint 8 users will find similar settings in the Tool Settings while users of v9 will find them in the Brush Settings Docker. Oh for a version when they don't make such drastic changes....
In Figure 8 I used this brush to lay in the background and the clouds. It was on the clouds that I changed the Transparency and Softness to 90. I'm working In Corel PHOTO-PAINT 7 and the size of the brush will not change right away when you change the number. You have to click either on the color or on your palette or in the little circle that shows the shape of the brush. Dumb, but that's the way it is.
Paint over the barn and silo using the same brush. When painting the barn with the same color red, the Impressionist brush adds a little of another color with it. Use three shades of gray on the silo using the same brush. The tree by the barn is done the same way using three shades of green. Do the same thing with the front and side of the house. The roof has dabs of a darker color on it.
Change the shape of the brush and the numbers to make the leaves on the two larger trees. When you click the down arrow beside the nib, you have a lot to choose from. The shape of the leaves looks like a rounded right facing down arrow. On the first tab I change the size to 10 and leave the others at 0. On the second tab, only the Anti-ailiasing is checked. On the third tab, Number of dabs is 1, Spacing is 15, Spread is 100 and Fade Out is 0. The Hue, Saturation and Lightness are all 5. Before I started the leaves I drew some branches on the tree on the right. Use three shades of green and started with the darkest one. The flowers in the pots are made with the same tool using a smaller size.
The two bushes beside the house are painted using the Paintbrush tool and Median Fine streaks with a smaller number. See samples of the finished trees in Figure 2.
The small yellow flowers are made with a size 5 and 25 Transparency on the first tab, Anti-aliasing and 25 Smoothing on the second tab and on the third tab, 1 Dab, 100 Spacing, 100 Spread and 0 Fade Out. The Hue, Saturation and Lightness are 1.
Even if you don't do my picture, try making these few brushes and it will give you an idea of how to change them. You can make these brushes under either the Palette or the Brush button.
In the windows add a wide brush stroke of -8 Brightness to soften the look of the glass.
Hopefully this will get you started using Photo-Paint to paint a picture. Check out Corel's Help file on how to make Custom Colors and add them to your palette. One way to adjust a color on your palette is to darken it by adding more black or lightening it by taking out some of the black. Experiment until you get what you want. When you add the new colors they will come in at the end of your palette, but you can drag them to where you want them on the palette.
Foster and I would love to know if this has helped anyone!
Hemera Photo Objects Christmas Card · Still Life with Hemera Photo Objects · Draw to Paint in the Style of Seurat · Flowers in a Pitcher · Flowers for Foster · Symbols from CorelDRAW to Corel PHOTO-PAINT · Camping in the Woods · Quick Christmas Ornaments with CorelDRAW · In The Blink of an Eye · Creating Needlepoint and Cross Stitch Patterns with CorelDRAW · Old MacHughking Had a Farm · Dancing in the Dark in the Park: A Fantasy with Symbols · Creating Stacking Boxes in CorelDRAW · Creating a Basket Weave Fill in CorelDRAW
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