Make a fresh Quick Clone of the apples in a bowl. Sample a warm light brown from the wooden planks or just choose a pleasing neutral color for the paper. Use the technique for changing paper color you did earlier, or just “pour” the new color into the clone with the Paint Bucket. It won’t matter unless you erase. My motto, incidentally is “Life is short[md]don’t erase.” I actually had 500 golf pencils printed up.

Make a Cloner

You can turn a variant from any category into a Cloner brush instantly. All you do is click the little rubber stamp icon in the Color panel. The hue ring and value/saturation triangle will go gray, indicating that your brush is now using clone color. You can toggle regular color control back on by clicking the Rubber Stamp icon again.

Instead of working with the Chalk Cloner this time, turn Square Hard Pastel from the custom palette into a Cloner, by enabling clone color. Increase its size to about 25 pixels. A Hard Pastel shows paper grain very boldly, so it’s important to choose a paper that will enhance the painting. Figure 2.18 shows three possible textures that are available in the Paper library. From left to right, they are Italian Watercolor, Coarse Cotton Canvas, and Pebble Board. You can adjust the size of the paper grain, as well as its strength, by changing the brightness and/or contrast of the paper element. Open the Papers panel, shown in Figure 2.19, to make those changes as desired.

No need to start with an outline this time, just turn Tracing Paper opacity up to the maximum, 90%, so you see just enough of the source image to guide your brush. This will be a more detailed rendering than the first version. Apply your pastel strokes following the contours of the fruit and the bowl. Figure 2.20 shows the basic elements laid in.

 

 

Now you can work on details and accents. Tap the Reset Tool icon to return your brush to its original size. Enable Clone Color once again, and find a few areas to bring into somewhat sharper focus. Keep the source image visible at all times, referring to it frequently. 

 

The challenge at this stage is to keep from getting too “tight” and simply reproducing the original photo. Also, it’s tempting to rely on Cloner brushes too much. Remember to take control from time to time, using colors that you actually pick yourself! A good drawing will have a focal point or two, with other sections less important. Ways to reduce the visual impact of portions of your drawing include blurring, erasing, and altering color or contrast.