Using Dynamic Layer's Kaleidoscope to create Repeatable Tiles - Corel Painter 6 Tutorial

Jacquelin Vanderwood 1 If you're into web design, textile design, home decorating, a muralist, or maybe a stain glass window artist, you'll enjoy this lesson. Open up a picture or a piece of artwork. In this demo I am using a photo that I manipulated in Painter. Duplicate the layer by pressing Control+A, Control+C, and Control+V. 2 Select Dynamic Layers. Click on the Kaleidoscope icon. Press Apply. Let's use the default of 100 x 100 pixels. Press OK. Use the little hand button to move the square around and see what amazing designs you can create.  3 Below are a few examples that I achieved using the original picture. 4 When you've settled on the design you like, click the little boxed arrow in the upper right corner of the Layers palette and select Drop and Select. Don't panic. 5 Select Float. This will put the design on a separate layer. Make sure you have the duplicated original layer selected again, and continue making new designs. Forget the Canvas background at this point as it is destroyed and that is why we made a duplicate of it. 6 When you have completed your tiles, select the Canvas layer, then highlight fill (Control+F) and fill it with a plain color, preferably a color which is not in the tiles as it is hard to see what you are doing. As you can see, I have a lighter background in the tiles below. Here's what I did: I zoomed in and started setting the tiles side by side. I also duplicated the one tile as well. You have to be exact when setting the tiles side by side. When that was completed, I then selected Drop All (located under the arrow in the Layers palette). I then used the Magic Wand to make a the selection of the dropped tiles, clicked on Invert and again selected Float. 7 Up in the right-hand corner of Patterns I chose Capture Pattern, pressed OK, and was then able to select and manipulate the size and offset of the pattern. 8 Using the Patterns palette, I manipulated the scale of the pattern and did a Fill. As you can see, this tool can be very handy in a variety of situations. 9 Below are further examples of original pictures used and a few tiles gleaned from them. The bottom example has the original tile on the right and the one on the left with Apply Surface Texture to give it a 3D effect.   10 Here is an example where I used one tile and set it as a Pattern then created a square and inverted it, and finally by manipulating the size of the pattern, was able to create this elegant frame.  11 The original tile is in the upper left corner. I used various Effects to achieve the other three samples using the original tile as the base to start with. If you have the imagination, you can create anything your heart desires. Have fun. This is a great way to design note paper and envelopes. How about designing custom tiles like these and take them into have them set on ceramic tile. If you wanted to paint a room and want to do some custom tiling, enlarge and print one of the tiles out that you created, then cut several templates out for the different colors and begin creating a luxurious custom decorated room with little expense.   Copyright 2001, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved