Painted lays its strokes along the color edges in an image. Anything with strong edges or smooth color bands gives it something to follow, not just photos. Each recipe below lists the settings used for the example with it. None of them use tints or focus unless noted.
Painted Type
Set bold type over a gradient in a comp, then save a frame with Composition > Save Frame As > File and drop the still onto Painted.
- Settings: 5 brushes, Detail 80%.
- Why it works: the fine brushes chase hard edges, so the letters sharpen last and crawl out of the mess.
Painted Gradients
Any smooth, swirling gradient turns into flowing brushwork, because each stroke follows the color bands.
- Settings: 5 brushes, Detail 75%.
- Use it for: painted backgrounds and transitions. Time-reverse a copy of the comp to unpaint it again.
Pixel Art
Scale tiny pixel art up with nearest-neighbor sampling first, so the pixels stay crisp. The example started as a 40 by 25 pixel image.
- Settings: 4 brushes, Detail 50%.
- Why it works: every row of pixels is an edge, so the sky smears into horizontal bands while solid shapes like the sun stay chunky.
A Painting of a Painting
Paint an image, then feed the result back in.
- Paint the image. The example used 5 brushes at Detail 75%, with focus brushed over the eyes and mouth.
- Go to the finished frame of the Painted comp and save it with Composition > Save Frame As > File.
- Drop the saved frame onto Painted and paint it again with loose settings: 3 brushes at Detail 15%.
The second pass re-reads every stroke as a fatter one, which gives an expressive, heavily worked look.
Paint of Paint
A macro photo of real, thick oil paint comes back as brushwork you can animate. The strokes follow every ridge of the paint.
- Settings: 5 brushes, Detail 75%.
- Watch out: busy textures produce a lot of strokes. The example came to about 18,000 strokes and took about 35 seconds to build. Lower Detail first if a build feels slow.