Part 3: Virtual Egg Painting

Now's your chance to bring out your own creative tendencies. Dump the paint can. It usually just fills a shape with a solid color. Instead, try one of the many variations of brushes in your graphics software. Pick a pretty color and draw a haphazard streak across your egg.

Remember, if you used the mask (Part 2) then you can swipe that brush across the image and paint will only show up on your egg, not the surrounding masked area. You don't have to fill in the whole egg. Let the patterns created by the brush create texture and interest. Use one color or two or three.

Don't worry about all the different settings for different brushes. The point right now is to simply get a swatch of color across your egg. Do several eggs at once.

The top egg, right, is done with one color, one brush. The middle egg uses two colors and two brushes. The bottom egg uses two colors and a splatter brush.

Paint with pictures
One of the cool tools in Corel Photo-Paint is painting with image lists. Using a special brush, the program "paints" by layering on an ordered or random series of images. One of the advantages in our egg-painting is that it allows me to add more detail and more color to my eggs with just one or two mouse clicks.

You can also achieve the same effect by pasting different pictures onto your egg image. When masked, only the parts on the egg will show through.

The point in filling the egg with an image is not to have the picture of the rose or whatever on the egg. The pictures simply provide shapes and colors that give the egg pretty colors after we apply the filters in Part 4.

The top egg, left, has portions of a leaf. The image on the middle egg is from photos of butterflies. The flowers on the bottom egg are actually on a picture of a postage stamp.

While we could stop here and have some pretty eggs, let's go a bit further. In Part 4 we'll add some of those filters, the ones that turn perfectly pretty pictures into something totally unrecognizable. It'll be fun!

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