"Columbine Digital Watercolor" Corel Painter 11 - Plus

Columbine Digital Watercolor

Yesterday I tried a different way of posting the steps I took to produce the image of the two guitars and music stand. I have described the steps taken today in paragraph form. I would be open to comments on which form you preferred, the bulleted outline of each step or the paragraph explanation of the steps taken. Leave a comment if you have a preference, please.

This image is from a Challenge at Painter Talk forums. I downloaded the photograph to a working folder and unzipped it. Then I opened Picasa 3.9 and browsed to the folder where the photograph was. I opened it with Corel Painter 11.

In Painter 11 I created a quick clone of the photograph, used the brightness/contrast to reduce the brightness of the original. With a lighter cast to the image I selected the Auto Van Gogh Artist brush and auto painted the full picture. I saved that with an iterative name and browsed to it in Picasa.

From there I opened with Corel Painter Photo Essentials 4 and selected  Photo Painting, Simple Watercolor with a Jagged edge, Color set to Lighten, Paper set to Coarse Canvas and the brush set to a Coarse Watercolor brush. I also set it to Random Strokes.

I then clicked Start and let the program Render my Watercolor painting. I saved another iteration and through Picasa I opened with Corel PSP Pro X3. I fit to screen and went to Adjust, Brightness and Contrast, Curves and added back in some depth of color.

I added my signature with Image, Visible Watermark. Then applied Image, Picture Frame twice, once for the Mat and then added the Golden frame.  I Merged all layers with Flatten, and saved that file.

I applied Image, Resize to 888 x 1000 pixels 16bit RGB and saved that iteration for display.