Painting Original Art Using Corel Paint Shop Pro X4

This page was inspired by another Hubber who published an original landscape painting he'd done with Corel's Paint Shop Pro. I don't recall if it was the X4 version or not. The sticking point was that the author described the painting-with-mouse process as "very hard to do"...but not impossible.

After a few hours of experimentation, I decided he was probably right about the difficulty factor if the desired end product was a gallery quality piece of fine art...but not all that troublesome if you were creating "different" forms of art.

Cartoon quality political commentary, for example.

My first project required no reality based trees or rocks or sky or anything like that. Rather, the Freehand Selection tool was used to mark out irregular shapes which were then colored brightly with the Flood Fill tool.

A bit of added text...and one more political message was ready to be launched upon the vast seas of the Internet.

Note: At first, the original art images were hiding from the HubPages computer. It took a while before I figured it out: They were all saved in .PSP Image format, which is not supported by HP programming...and therefore remains invisible to searches from this site.

Solution: Reopening the photos in Paint Shop Pro, then saving copies in .JPG format. Voila'! The invisible becomes visible!

The next step turned out to be a bit of a sidestep. That is, it didn't start out with a blank canvas but with a photo taken during the most recent GOP Presidential debate. I wanted to know how to put one person's head on another person's body.

Found an eHow tutorial. It's a great tutorial, but the process (at least until it's learned well enough to be internalized) is laborious. So I stopped after cutting Newt Gingrich's head off of his body and filling in the blank space with bright green.

From there, it got a little artsy-craftsy, using the Paint Brush and a few of the Tubes.

Well...I thought it was time to get back to the original art, but my wife saw that last photo and wanted to know how the "stuff" got all over Newt like that. She deserved a simple demo using just one of the tubes. obviously, so....

Now, back to original art.

Note: Just now, while giving the finished artwork a final looksee, I spotted a typo (of all things). Where it's supposed to say "PRESIDENT'S", the apostrophe went dyslexic on me and jumped in early, producing "PRESIDEN'TS". So, big whoop. Not going to correct that this time around. Correction would require (a) smudging out the text entirely and (b) retyping.

Wait a minute! What am I thinking?! The very time one doesn't get fixed prior to publication will be the time one goes viral. Of course I'm going to correct that!

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Done. Took all of maybe two or three minutes. Didn't time it. Should have.

Aside from dyslexic text (now corrected), the following was produced using the Selection Tool (so when buckets of paint were dropped to Flood Fill the sky and also the land, the colors hit the right spots).

From there, it was a matter of drawing in a bit of darker greenish paint (on the land) with the Paint Brush and blending that with the base coat (artistically, one hopes) to produce a quasi-believable "desolate dunes" effect.

Preset Shapes for the cartoon text balloons, plus a bit of (non-dyslexic) text. and the artwork was complete.

Oh. No, it still needed one thing: The speaker in the background, constructed entirely of black Paint Brush drops (with the size of the brush set very small).

Yes, it took a whie...but no, it really wasn't that difficult to accomplish.

Clouds are easy to produce in Corel Paint Shop Pro X4. Simply Flood Fill a base color for the sky, use the Lighten tool to rough out some white shapes, and then "mess around" with the Smudge tool.

Berries (other than the Tube berries) are easily created with the basic Paint Brush: Just daub the thing wherever, and little round dots of color hit the canvas. Sure, that's simplistic, but we're not going for realism here...just a picture that will carry the message.

The final art piece (for this page) grew out of experimentation with the Preset Shapes tool, specifically the ellipse--which became Barack "Hulk" Obama's eye outlines. The round iris shapes in the eyes are nothing more than single Paint Brush dots with the brush size calibrated to fit the ellipse it needed to fill. The mouth started out as a preset rectangle shape.

For the whites of the eyes, white paint and the smudge brush (set fairly small and fairly soft) did the trick. More Paint Brush work added the white "Appaloosa-looking" dots on the eyes and (at a larger setting) the red background.

The rest (except for text) is freehand.

That's it for this one.

Over the years, I've occasionally made a half-hearted attempt to learn to draw and/or paint using a computer program. None of the efforts ever "took".

This go-round looks like it's going to be different. Corel Paint Shop Pro X4 should hire me to promote their cause, I'm so thoroughly sold on the product.

Oh. Wait. I have been hired, haven't I? At least, I have if any of their ads show up on this page.

Better hit Publish and find out.