Naturally, Painter’s texturing requires tweaking here and there, and it’s a very unusual image whose texture is uniform from foreground to background, top to bottom, and all parts between. Here you see how things look fairly early on in the process of smoothing and gently lightening the shadows.
The brush work involved a great deal of smoothing, switching to pencils and markers and chalks to add color and detail, then back to brushes to resmooth and re-re-re-re-resmooth. I used Painter about a year in the early 1990s before it occurred to me to use cloning as a smoothing technique. As I recall, I inadvertently made an image’s cloning source itself rather than a scanned image.
Here’s what happens when one applies more texturing after lots of smoothing and roughening and resmoothing. Varying the paper textures and numeric settings produces an almost infinite variety of results. Naturally, it’s easy to save multiple iterations of a painting and layer them together—along with selected portions of layers—in Photoshop. The possibilities are so numerous, in fact, one occasionally spends hours pursuing techniques simply to see where they’ll lead. This morning’s failure may prove next Thursday evening’s brilliant method; then again, some sterling successes, reconsidered later, prove leaden messes. How to tell? The only reliable method I’ve discovered thus far is simply to hurry up and wait a few days, then revisit one’s work.