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© 2000 by Ruth Huking. All Rights Reserved.
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Love that Foster, he is really making me learn Corel 9! Let me tell you, the quickest and easiest way is just to get in there and do it. You can read all the books and articles you want but doing it is the best way.
This time I am going to show you how you can create a Pointillism picture in Corel PHOTO-PAINT. Georges Seurat was one of the famous Impressionist painters in the late 1800’s who used that style. He painted his pictures completely with just little dots of paint. One of his paintings is named The Lighthouse At Honfleur painted in 1886. My picture is “similar.”
The Lighthouse At Honfleur is approximately 26" by 32". I did mine in the computer at 4" x 5". I’ve tried to make my dots comparable in size. I have again used Symbols for all the objects. The two buildings, the bridge and the lighthouse are under the Building Symbols. The sailboat is under Transportation, the bench is under Tools and the seagull is under Animals. Below, you can see the original Symbols and how to change them to fit the picture. If you have been following my tutorials, you know you have to break them apart and then you can stretch, mirror, extrude, delete parts and node edit them. I made the jetty by shrinking the straight parts of the bridge and duplicating them. It might be easier to make it from scratch!
In CorelDRAW, set up guidelines on your page for a 4" x 5" picture. As you do the symbols, fill them with white, which will make them easier to see and move. Arrange your symbols on the page and draw in your sky, water, hills and the foreground as shown at left. Fill them with white also. Under the Pick tool Properties, I have the "Treat as filled" box unchecked. You can also do this on the Property Bar when the Pick tool is active and nothing is selected. It is the next to last icon on the right. I find that it works better that way when you are drawing pictures. If you have it unchecked, you will have to click on the outline of the symbols to fill them. Next, fill your objects with a very light shade of colors similar to what you are going to use when you paint them. Then take the outline off of everything. Play with your design until you are satisfied with the arrangement. It doesn’t have to look exactly like mine (below)!
Now you are ready to convert the drawing to a bitmap. Click on the sky, hills, water and foreground and click on Bitmaps | Convert to Bitmap. Then click on Edit under Bitmaps, which will bring your picture into Corel PHOTO-PAINT. (Editor's Note: I prefer to export the whole image and open it in Photo-Paint. This alleviates several other steps listed below.) Save that file as a .cpt and give it a name. This will be your new picture. When you go back to your Draw file, Undo Convert to bitmap to keep your Draw picture editable.
Select all the other objects in your image and this time when you convert them to a bitmap check the Transparency box. Use Edit | Bitmaps again and in Photo-Paint, click Edit | Copy (or Ctrl-C). Open a new Photo-Paint file and select Edit | Paste | As new Object (Ctrl-V). You may have to move your objects a little bit to get them where they belong. I have my nudge arrows set to the lowest setting in both Draw and Photo-Paint so I can nudge things to where I want them to go. Before you close out draw, Undo the last Convert to bitmap. By doing these Undos, you can start over again if you’re not happy with the first Paint results. I know all about that!
Now comes the fun part! It would be ideal if you all had graphic tablets (see our Computer Hardware page for details), but you can do it with a mouse. Start with the background and make the objects invisible for now by clicking on the Eye icon in the Objects Docker. I think it is easiest to work from the top down and good to get the whole background covered first. Select Windows | Dockers and make sure Objects and Brush Settings are checked. I prefer to have my whole palette showing (Tools | Options | Workspace | Customize | Palette | Maximum palette rows when docked) and it is docked on the bottom of my page with the Status Bar below it.
This picture is going to be painted using just one Custom brush. Click on the Paintbrush in your Toolbox. On the Property Bar, click on the first down arrow and then click on the Artistic Brush, which is the last one. Double click the Brush tool again and you should see a Docker similar to the one at right. Change the numbers to the following: Size 5 with a hard edge, Transparency 10, Rotate 0, Flatten 0, Soft Edge 15, Smoothing 1, Fade Out 0, Number of Dabs 1, Spacing 15, Spread 75, Hue 5, Saturation 5, Lightness 5, Number of Orbits 1, Radius 25, Rotation Speed 10, Grow Speed 15, Grow Amount 0. Then click Brush Options icon near the right end of the Property Bar. Click on Save and give this brush the name Seurat. If you check the down arrow where it says Custom Art Brush near the left end of the Property Bar you should see your new brush.
You might want to start with just a plain page and practice a little bit. I’m sure you all know that if you click and hold over the paint wells, you will get a pop up menu with 49 shades of that color. Start with Light Blue Green and pick one of the darker shades. Paint with it a little bit. Notice that you are getting different shades in the dots. This is caused by the Hue, Saturation and Lightness settings. The default settings of 15 are much too harsh, that’s why I changed them to 5. Now double click on the paint rectangle in the Status Bar where you will see the numbers for the colors. I prefer to work with the CMYK numbers. Lower the K number by a third and paint again, blending in with the first dots. Then lower the K number again and do the same thing. You can do most of your picture with the Spread set at 75. Change the setting to 150, and using another similar color, paint over what you have just done. The dots will be further apart. Try 300 and see what happens. In some of the grass areas I added some reddish dots at 300. See the sample of the Spread below. For most of the picture, keep your brush size at 5 as that keeps all the dots the same size. There are a few places where you might want to make the size smaller, like around the windows and the spire on the lighthouse. When you are doing the windows, you can hold down the Control key and the brush will paint in a straight line.
Don’t worry about matching my colors exactly. You might want to write some of the numbers down so you can go back to them. You can always go back and add or change the colors after you get the objects painted. Remember, if you add more K your picture will get darker without changing the other three numbers. Play with adding a little more or a little less of the other three numbers to see how that changes a color. If the color doesn’t change right away, click once in the white part of another box. This is something that Corel needs to fix. (Editor's Note: It is working as designed.) With practice you can mix your own colors. If you don’t want to play with the numbers, just click and hold on the color you are working with and pick another one off the square palette that shows up. I have left the number of Undos at the default, which is 10. That gives you a little leeway to try your next color.
When you are ready to tackle the objects, uncheck the Eye in the Objects Docker and make sure that the Lock Object Transparency icon is activated, the left most icon at right. That keeps your “paint” from going outside the lines. The objects are done the same way. I think it is easier to do the windows and door first and work out from there. As you progress, hit your F9 key and look at the picture full screen. Leave it there for a bit and walk away from the computer. When you come back, you might see something to change. You might get to the point when you would like to be able to paint on the whole picture at once. With the Objects active, click the Lock Object Transparency icon again and you can go outside the lines.
There is one other tool that can help you a lot in this picture and that is the Clone tool. It is on the Brush Flyout. To practice, open a new page and using your Seurat brush, cover an area as shown at left. That also shows the Clone tool activated. When you activate the Clone tool, you will get a cross hair in a circle. Click the area you want to Clone from and the cross hair will stay there and you can move to the area you want to Clone to and start painting. You will see both the cross hair and the circle move together. Let’s say you painted into an area by mistake. Instead of trying to match that color again, just clone some of the area around it to cover up your mistake as shown at right. You can make the size of the Clone brush larger than your Seurat brush if you need to. It will clone the Size 5. Right clicking with the mouse will make the Clone brush reset. Make a friend out of your Clone brush, as it can be a big help. HINT: Use it to fill the rest of your background after you have painted a little of the colors.
The images below are close ups of some of the detail.
The last thing you can do is to import the finished image back into CorelDRAW. Draw a rectangle around the picture and select Effects | Lens. Click on Transparency and make it 75%. Under Color and Other put in C0, M24, Y73, K30 and Apply. Remove the outline. This will give it an effect that will make it look 100 years old!
This probably isn’t going to get completed in a day. If it does, I’ll come and take lessons from you!
Do you have any suggestions for future tutorials? I'd love to hear them. Just send me an e-mail and tell me what you'd like to see.
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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