This is a photograph which languished for many years as a reject, for, as a full-length figure set against a black background, its cropped merit hadn’t been recognized. There were a other faults linked to the white blouse and these were dealt with by a doing a little ‘painting’ intended to retain the photographic impression and I had thought to upload it in that presentation. Instead it seemed more useful to continue the Painter familiarization process. So what have we done? Firstly, I set up a blank canvas layer then duplicated the photograph on two layers above, to give three in all. I then used the sketch effect on the top layer (Effects> Surface Control> Sketch). This isn’t new to Painter 11 and I’d previously considered it too crude for serious attention due to the lack of variety in the drawing strokes (though this is easily correctable by use of the erase tool to thin some strokes, or by thickening others through over painting). The Sketch effect provides a number of sliders for fine tuning so perseverance is very worthwhile, thus with something acceptable achieved, the transparency of the layer was progressively adjusted for me to study how the sketch could best interact with the photograph below. The resultant image had a cloudiness and was far too light for my purposes so it was saved as a TIFF though I’ve since wondered if dropping the layers onto the canvas would have been the neater solution. Anyway, I now brought the TIFF image back into Painter and used the Brightness/Contrast sliders together with a little sharpening to strengthen the picture,and continued until a result was deemed satisfactory. This manipulation had caused the original black background to be replaced with a flat indeterminate colour which contributed nothing but boredom to the large expanse around the figure, so I had resource to the “Apply Lighting” effect (Effects> Surface Control> Apply Lighting) then experimented with some of various base lighting options available and to the result you see. Interesting is the way the background shadow of Alison has been drawn out and now provides intelligent variety. In this series of pictures you’ll know I’m only touching at the contributions Painter’s many options can make to an image but familiarization is the first step towards creative control. Finally a few words of appreciation to the Renderosity Admin people. I suspect they have been extremely tolerant as I’ve worked on the very edges of what they recognize as primarily a photograph. Cliff