P6: Constellations

[athena]

Hello everyone!

As I was playing with painter 6 I came across the Fairy Dust brush, a variant of the FX brush. So here goes a brief experiment with the Fairy Dust brush.

This experiment works best when you've just opened Painter 6 (only because if you've had painter open for a while, you might have changed the default colors etc.)

You should have a photo in your PC of someone or something that you want to put in the stars. I chose a picture of my cat.

http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/pepsi62.jpg

But before we get to opening your photo we need to decide what color our sky will be. By deciding now, you can set up the default background that will appear when you get to cloning your image for a trace.

I wanted a black night sky. Now, the fastest way to lay down color on your canvas is to change the paper color as you're creating your new file.

http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/newpage1.gif

Do you see the currently black rectangle over the words paper color? Yep, click on that and select your sky color. You must make one new image with the paper color of choice. If you don't set this up now, then when you open your photo and clone it, then select and delete the contents of the clone, you'll have a white background (or whatever your last paper color was) which would translate into a white sky later on . . . ( a little confusing, I know, but if you try it you'll see what I mean)

<ul>Now feel free to
[*]open your picture,[*] clone it[*]while clone is active, "select all" then hit delet key[*]most importantly set your clone source to be the original[*]there are other posts here that give good detail about setting up the clone source and the clone (that was a brief re-cap only)[/list]

So if you chose a black paper color for your sky, then your image might look something like this.
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/pepsi62clone.jpg

Quickly, lets set the color for white stars. Since Painter defaults to black ink and white secondary color when you first open it up. This is the fastest way to get the white ink for your black canvas

To get from here
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/color1.gif

to here
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/color2.gif

click here
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/color3.gif

That sets your ink for white stars. (of course, you can set any colored stars you want).

Now here we need to set up our brush. Select the Fairy dust variant of the FX brush.
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/brushfx1.gif

Odds are your brush settings will look like this:
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/control1.gif

mouse users take note of the 100% pressure there at the bottom. this brush will jitter when 100% pressure is applied so move the mouse slider back to 15%

Unfortunately, in my experiments, this is where the pen and tablet proved more precise than an adjusted mouse. If I pressed once firmly with my pen then 1 star is placed where I placed the brush. Mouse tends to add a bit of random placement so mousers may have to adjust the random placement down to zero.

Place your single stars in the constellation. At the end, I chose cyan for the cats' eyes in the constellation.

Finally, go back to the brush controls and set dab to single pixel
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/control2.gif

At this point I'd suggest the mousers kick the random placement up and the pressure up so you can populate the sky with ordinary looking stars that make your constellation look even more "stellar"

This is how my experiment came out. . .

http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor...l1BPEPSI62.GIF

admittedly, not one of the 7 wonders of the modern world, but it was fun to create. And hopefully, it gives people ideas for their own experiments.

Athena
[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]


kitty in the sky with diamonds -- no apologies to the beatles [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[athena]

Hello everyone!

As I was playing with painter 6 I came across the Fairy Dust brush, a variant of the FX brush. So here goes a brief experiment with the Fairy Dust brush.

This experiment works best when you've just opened Painter 6 (only because if you've had painter open for a while, you might have changed the default colors etc.)

You should have a photo in your PC of someone or something that you want to put in the stars. I chose a picture of my cat.

http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/pepsi62.jpg

But before we get to opening your photo we need to decide what color our sky will be. By deciding now, you can set up the default background that will appear when you get to cloning your image for a trace.

I wanted a black night sky. Now, the fastest way to lay down color on your canvas is to change the paper color as you're creating your new file.

http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/newpage1.gif

Do you see the currently black rectangle over the words paper color? Yep, click on that and select your sky color. You must make one new image with the paper color of choice. If you don't set this up now, then when you open your photo and clone it, then select and delete the contents of the clone, you'll have a white background (or whatever your last paper color was) which would translate into a white sky later on . . . ( a little confusing, I know, but if you try it you'll see what I mean)

<ul>Now feel free to
[*]open your picture,[*] clone it[*]while clone is active, "select all" then hit delet key[*]most importantly set your clone source to be the original[*]there are other posts here that give good detail about setting up the clone source and the clone (that was a brief re-cap only)[/list]

So if you chose a black paper color for your sky, then your image might look something like this.
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/pepsi62clone.jpg

Quickly, lets set the color for white stars. Since Painter defaults to black ink and white secondary color when you first open it up. This is the fastest way to get the white ink for your black canvas

To get from here
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/color1.gif

to here
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/color2.gif

click here
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/color3.gif

That sets your ink for white stars. (of course, you can set any colored stars you want).

Now here we need to set up our brush. Select the Fairy dust variant of the FX brush.
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/brushfx1.gif

Odds are your brush settings will look like this:
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/control1.gif

mouse users take note of the 100% pressure there at the bottom. this brush will jitter when 100% pressure is applied so move the mouse slider back to 15%

Unfortunately, in my experiments, this is where the pen and tablet proved more precise than an adjusted mouse. If I pressed once firmly with my pen then 1 star is placed where I placed the brush. Mouse tends to add a bit of random placement so mousers may have to adjust the random placement down to zero.

Place your single stars in the constellation. At the end, I chose cyan for the cats' eyes in the constellation.

Finally, go back to the brush controls and set dab to single pixel
http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor2/control2.gif

At this point I'd suggest the mousers kick the random placement up and the pressure up so you can populate the sky with ordinary looking stars that make your constellation look even more "stellar"

This is how my experiment came out. . .

http://www.nol.net/~athena/paintutor...l1BPEPSI62.GIF

admittedly, not one of the 7 wonders of the modern world, but it was fun to create. And hopefully, it gives people ideas for their own experiments.

Athena
[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]


kitty in the sky with diamonds -- no apologies to the beatles [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[gmotto]

Athena,
Neat Picture, of a good looking Kitty. I wish I had the patience to be able to put a tutorial together as you do.
When I am working on a project I wind up blasting away at it and have a hard time keeping track of the time let alone what I have been doing to the image. When it is done the image tells me so and most of the time I don't remember what all I did to it.--- Anyway I do like your picture, and your Style.

Greg.