Corel Photo-Paint Art Strokes: Conte Crayon



		Introduction
		Charcoal
		Conté Crayon
		Crayon
		Cubist
		Dabble
		Impressionist
		Palette Knife
		Pastels
		Pen and Ink
		Pointillist
		Scraperboard
		Sketch Pad
		Watercolour
		Water Marker
		Wave Paper

2. Conté Crayon

Conté Crayon simulates textures produced with a conté crayon. You can select multiple crayon colours and set the crayon pressure and the granularity of the texture.

The Conté Crayon Art Stroke is really quite powerful. It can create a wide range of 'painted effects, from full colour impressionist style images, black and white drawing style images, even painted duotone and limited tone style images. You should take some time to explore all the different possibilities that this effect can create.

1. Open your image. For the example shown here I have used 719016.WI from the PHOTOS/BUSINESS folder of CD#3 from CorelDRAW 8 suite (Fig 1).

2. Open the Conté Crayon dialogue box (Effects > Art Strokes > Conté Crayon ). (Fig 2)

This dialogue box has four main adjustment areas: A Conte Colours selection area (marked in blue), a Paper Colour selector (green), a Pressure slide controller, and a Texture slide control (both marked in red here). The choice of colour in the Paper Colour selector is irrelevant until at least one of the Conte colours are selected for use. By default (or after the Reset button is clicked) no conte colours are selected and so the paper colour also has no significance. The paper colour will be white

Lets look at the simplest, i.e. the default setup first.

3. Press the Reset button and then press the Preview button if it isn't already depressed. This Art Stroke now creates a wonderful impressionist-style multi-coloured painting of your original image (Fig 3). If you pressed OK, then UNDO once and redisplay the Conte Crayon dialogue box to continue exploring this effect.

4. Decreasing the Pressure level allows more of the default white textured underlying canvas to show through just as it would with light crayon strokes. This creates an image with more whites and lighter tones. Conversely, increasing the Pressure level simulates firmer crayon strokes, covering more of the underlying textured canvas, increasing colour saturation and adding darker tones. (Fig 4)

5. The Texture level seems to adjust the bumpiness of the underlying canvas so that increasing the Texture creates more and larger regions where the crayon stroke lays down less colour. (Fig 5)

6. The Conte Colours area allows you to select one or more conte colours during the image transformation. Depending on the colours you choose to include you can create anything from a black and whit sketch to a duotone, to a limited tone painted image.

Try these:

First press the Reset button on the Conte Colours dialogue box.
Now check the conte colours checkboxes one by one to see the effect. Really nice duotone images are created.

Figs 6
a. black
b. white
c. orange
d. brown
e. tan

7. Now try using more than one colour to create limited tone paintings.
Here's some examples:

Figs 7
a. black + orange
b. black + orange + brown + tan
c. white + orange + brown + tan

8. The Paper colour selector allows us to change the colour of the underlying canvas used. As mentioned above, this is only effective if we choose one or more or the conte colours first. Using either only black or only white conte colour and the changing the paper colour results in a ful range of possible duotone creations. Here are some examples:

Figs 8:
a. black + white conte colours + default paper colour (233,233,215 RGB)
b. brown conte colour + red paper colour (255,0,0 RGB), Pressure = 1, Texture = 0
c. black conte colour + cyan paper colour (0,255,255 RGB), Pressure = 20, Texture = 2
d. all conte colours except orange + mauve paper colour (247,255,247 RGB), Pressure = 50, Texture = 5.

9. The result of applying the Conte Crayon Art Stroke effect is somewhat dependent on the size of the image you use. On larger images the underlying canvas texture and the stroke size will appear fairly fine. However on small images these attributes can appear quite course. If you wish to end up with a small image (as shown on these pages) it may be better to apply the affect to the large image first and then resample down to the desired size, rather than the reverse. Of course you may desire the course look at times. Fig 9 demonstrates this.

Fig 9a. Effect applied to large image then resampled.

Fig 9b. Image resampled first and then the effect is applied.

Fig 10. The original image was duplicated and then a black-white conte crayon effect applied to the duplicate. An eliptical transparency was then applied to the duplicate allowing the original to fade through at the centre.

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