Today’s post combines 2 different kinds of text painting to build a paint effect that renders a source image with colored text words. Some paint synthesizer editing tricks are used to be somewhat clever about how the individual text words are positioned on the canvas.
The paint action sequence below was used to create the painted text effect shown above. It combines together painting text on source edge derived bezier paths along with smart positioning of painted text word blocks using a Region Fill as Brush pen mode feature.
The PASeq starts off by erasing the current bezier path layer. A set of bezier paths are then generated from the source edges. The bezier path frame is then size pruned. Bezier paths are then connected if close. The bezier paths are then more severely size pruned. And then they are Simplify Lite stylized. All of this path generation and manipulation was by running various Path : Generate Paths and Path : Path Layer Commands menu commands.
The paint synthesizer was then used to paint in the stylized source edge bezier paths using the Path : Paint Paths : Full Layer menu command. A Text Brush Source was used to paint in the source edge paths (2nd gallery image above). The Brush Modulation control panel was configured so that the source brush text would modulate it’s orientation to follow the curved bezier paths (3rd gallery image above).
Normal text drawing with the paint synthesizer uses a single character for each paint nib. This was the approach used for the text that tracks the stylized bezier paths described above. For the second text painting pass, I wanted to paint in full words into rectangular regions. And I wanted the regions to be positioned intelligently so that they would try to fit in non painted areas of the canvas. I also wanted the text blocks to not overlap any source image color feature boundaries.
Region Fill as Brush pen mode has a special text drawing feature that will draw a complete text word as the current region’s alpha channel. So this will override the brush source alpha channel. When used in conjunction with a Source Alpha Brush Type this allows complete words to be drawn using the current Text Brush Source control parameters.
The 4th gallery image above shows the Region as Brush Mode control panel settings used for the last AutoPaint action step. Note that the Brush Option parameter is set to Alpha Only Text Brush Word. This feature was discussed in a previous post here.
To try and be smart about the rectangular region block positioning for the painted text words, I worked with parameters in the Path Start and Path End control panel to constrain the automatically generated paint path that would define the generated regions (5th and 6th gallery images above). Note that both of these control panel settings assume that the painting will take place on a black background.
I set the Generator parameter in the Region as Brush Mode control panel to Rectangle (4th gallery image above). This means that a diagonal auto-generated path will generate a full rectangular fill region.
So, I setup the Path Shape and Path Angle control panels to draw straight line paths at a 45 degree angle. The Path Start and Path End control panels are configured so that no paint paths will start on an existing painted in part of the canvas, and any generated paths will end if they run into a painted part of the canvas. The Local Color Range option in the Path End control panel is also setup to insure that text words don’t overdraw source color feature boundaries.
The automatic positioning of the tex block regions is good but not perfect with the paint synthesizer edits described above. So I set the Nib Masking parameter in the Paint Fill Apply control panel to if Black. This insures that the painted text words will not overwrite any existing painted text in the canvas (painting is auto-masked to only occur on black canvas areas).
The PASeq preset used to generate this effect is available 6-12-.paseq
I ran the PAseq preset on a double size canvas, and then resized the painted canvas down by 50% to get my final output image. I did this as a quick way to smooth out the painted text edges.
