Xaos Tools' Paint Alchemy

This is a neat little package that lets you specify a variety of parameters to produce painter effects on a particular picture. (The picture in question for this part of the exercise is Bert Kit's "King of Frogs," an illustration of one of Aesop's Fables. The picture comes in two parts:

I just used the top part for the exercises. I picked a portion of the bottom, then used Xaos Tools' Terrazzo [with "Prickly Pear" symmetry] to make the background for this page.)

Paint Alchemy lets you pick from a Painter-like bewildering variety of brushes, then change the

to determine how it applies the technique to your picture. Each of the bulleted items above opens its own little sub-menu window and provides you with the opportunity to go completely nuts in varying exactly how you want that particular parameter to be set up. When you get it the way you want it, though, Paint Alchemy allows you to save all the settings as a preset, so you can do exactly the same thing to any other picture you want to do the exact same thing to. (Personally, I think this particular feature is silently sponsored by the manufacturers of hard drives, so you have to go out and purchase an external 100 gigabyte hard drive just to hold your Paint Alchemy and Flaming Pear presets. You want to start with KPT? Now yer talkin' terabytes!)

Onward!

Here's the original:

And now, the alterations:

Starting with a you-bought-it-you-got-it preset under Misc. Styles, Crayon Textured Dense, I used the following settings:

Coverage -- Brush density: 6680; Stroke Layering: Ordered; Paint Mixing: Over; Horizontal Placement Variation: 50; Vertical Placement Variation: 75

Color -- Brush Color: From Image; Background Color:218, 75, 100 (HSV color space); Hue Variation 10; Saturation Variation: 11; Lightness Variation: 20

Angle -- Control Brush Angle Using: Image Hue; Angle on Warmest Hue: -128; ...And on Coolest Hue: 180; Angle Variation: 45

Size -- Control Brush Size Using: Radial Distribution (I chose the big frog as my center point); Size at Center Point: 414; ...And at Edge:5493; Size Variation: 15

Opacity -- Control Brush Opacity Using: Radial Distribution (again, the big frog as center point): Opacity at Center Point: 100; ...And at Edge: 0; Opacity Variation: 12

Randomize: 1; Jitter Frames: Off

The end effect reminds me of Seurat, on the morning after a misguided experiment with Pernod.

Starting with a you-bought-it-you-got-it preset under Sketch Styles, I used the following settings:

Coverage -- Brush density:22528; Stroke Layering: Random; Paint Mixing: Blend; Horizontal Placement Variation: 61; Vertical Placement Variation: 62

Color -- Brush Color: From Image; Background Color: 0, 20, 100(HSV color space); Hue Variation 25; Saturation Variation: 40; Lightness Variation: 0

Angle -- Control Brush Angle Using: Image Lightness; Angle on Darkest: 0; ...And on Lightest: 61; Angle Variation: 0

Size -- Control Brush Size Using: Image Lightness; Size Darkest: 1554; ...And on Lightest: 0; Size Variation: 0

Opacity -- Control Brush Opacity Using: Image Lightness:: Opacity at Darkest: 10; ...And at Edge: 100; Opacity Variation: 0

Randomize: 1; Jitter Frames: On

So now we've got a kind Degas thingie, during his I Feel So Pink Period.
Okay, let's get a little more realistic here: This is just the basic Mosaic Styles: Mosaic Small preset, with nothing changed. Kind of what you'd find on the wall of the Basilica of St. Rana the Amphibious in the Carpathian Mountains.
And for the end of this little demonstration, from the basic Vortex Styles: Vortex Brushed, applied on its own layer over the original, using the Darken blending mode. It keeps the froggies as recognizable, but adds a bit of an edgy quality to the pondy background.

 

There's More!

Let me outta here!

Let's go see!