Activating the Genuine paintbrush
The Genuine paintbrush is found in the control window 'Specials'. The paintbrush must be activated manually. This is required to avoid unnecessary memory overhead that won't be used in normal photo mosaic creation. It also assures that all the settings of the mosaics are correctly taken on board at start.
The Genuine paintbrush is initiated by checking the checkbox 'Activate paintbrush'. The program will then calculate the colours and associated tiles. No photo mosaic picture will be drawn, but instead a separate drawing board will be shown.

Drawing with the paintbrush
You can simply draw with the mouse on the now open drawing board ('canvas'). Press the left button of the mouse and move the mouse over the canvas (keep the left button pressed). A trail of miniature pictures will now be drawn, perfectly making up the photo mosaic. But now picture my picture. There are 7 additional options to create special effects:

• 'Mask: activate the mask part of the Mask (or 32bit Overlay in case this type of mask was selected)
• 'Overlay: like Mask: use the Overlay of the 32bit Overlay (it will be dimmed if not available)
• 'Rotate' and 'Resize': rotate each mask between two angles and resize each picture randomly between 100% and a predefined smaller size (see here how to set these values)
• 'Shadow': activate the shadow effect
• 'Colourize' and 'Blend': manage the colour matching with these two additional settings (see here how to set its values)

There are three additional controls availabe for the Genuine paintbrush:

• 'Pen' and 'Eraser': select the pen or eraser to draw or erase parts of the painted canvas. The value of the slider next to the eraser indicates the size of the eraser (not of the pen!).
• 'Insert' or 'Overwrite' each of the miniature pictures: use the INSERT button on the keyboard to switch between these two modes (Insert will not draw pictures that are already drawn, Over will rewrite also existing drawn pictures). The status of this toggle is seen in the statusbar.
• Selecting a 'background picture' of the canvas. This picture will be resized to match the canvas of the original picture. This will be done without maintaining the aspect ratio (a distorted picture may thus appear!). To make sure the background picture is correct, first match the aspect ratio of the background picture with the selected source picture (e.g. using Photoshop or IrfanView).

Saving your Genuine paintbrush result
Via 'File | Save paintbrush' the paintbrush canvas can be saved.

One word of caution: this feature requires a powerful computer. On (relatively) slow systems the drawing can be sluggish, and the effect of drawing like a pencil on an canvas may not be as expected. In that case, draw slowly and let the computer take its time to place each 'stroke'.