Creating A Painterly Background

This is a different way to create a more painterly background for subjects such as Portraits. It works best in midtone to low tonal values and more continuous tone backgrounds. It has the advantage of creating a much more realistic brushed on look than using Painter Brushes alone and is easier than after-painting the image.
These are 4 examples of acrylic paint brush strokes applied to 8 1/2 x 11 canvas and black construction paper. You'll have to experiment with different dilutions of the paint. The color doesn't really matter since they will all be in grayscale when scanned. I usually try to vary the stroke sizes and direction. Also I will vary the contrast since low contrast works on some backgrounds better while high contrast works best on others.
I then scanned the images in at 300 dpi. usually using the gray scale option since I want a pretty neutral starting tone.
I chose this example for my starting image since the background is mostly continuous, but has some variation in color. In this case the starting image was created using my custom filter/brush combinations in Digital Image Pro, but you could create something similar suing Corel Painter's Chalk brushes.
In the first example, I've used this background (shown here using the default composite method), and have erased some of the image to allow the original painting to show thru. I do this because it makes for a less homogenous and more realistic paint look
Now I've changed the composite method to Overlay, and set the opacity down to 46%. This tones down the effect a little. You'll have to play around to get what you like. I also adjusted the contrast, scale, and sharpened this background layer. You can also see that by erasing some of the layer, I get just a few areas in the face where the canvas grain shows instead of one homogeneous one.
I did the same thing here using a different pattern of brush strokes.
This is how it looks when I changed the composite method to Overlay and adjusted the opacity to 46%. You can find lot more undocumented techniques and complete demonstrations done in audio-visual movie format as well a lot lot more stuff in my Master Class Tutorial series. Master Class Tutorial Series
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