I used Painter’s oil pastel tool to clone color from the source scanned image to my new blank document, which was the exact size and resolution as the source. I tinkered with textures and pastel sizes and densities and color depths until I achieved approximately the look I wanted, but took care not expect much of my painting at this point. If you’re accustomed to working with traditional media, you can think of this stage as something like roughing in a background or underpainting, although there are two enormous differences: a.) you can undo multiple mistakes, and b.) it’s not difficult to transport color from medium to medium to medium. Oil and water mix easily in Painter.
Here you see the nascent painting after I cloned more of the source image with varying incarnations of the oil pastel tool. How much color to add? How much texture to develop at this point? How large should the tool be? How much random color variation? Painter’s tools, in my experience, are at once more widely and more easily fine-tuned than traditional brushes and pigments and pens and markers and liquids and pencils. Newcomers sometimes find them dauntingly variable, but in due time, the fineness of control proves worth the trouble of learning how the brushes and palette knives and pencils and markers and air brushes and tools that have no traditional counterparts behave.