Structure underneath the patches
The adaptive block-in stays as the non-overlapping foundation. A separate painterly layer places bounded, overlapping capsules, ellipses and irregular marks across those regions, and you can regenerate the patches without touching the block-in beneath.
Keeping the two apart is what makes the mode usable. The patches are a suggestion about handling, and the block-in is the plan. When the patches stop being helpful you turn them off and the plan is still there.
What broken colour is actually for
Laying several related colours side by side rather than mixing them to one flat average keeps a passage alive at a distance. It is why a field painted in twenty greens reads as grass and a field painted in one green reads as paper.
The practical difficulty is deciding where the variation should sit and how far it should go, which is a judgement most people find easier to make against a proposal than from nothing. That is the whole job of this mode. It is not a filter that finishes the picture, it is a suggestion about where a passage can afford to break up.
Variation with limits
Patch size, direction, irregularity, overlap and colour variation follow the preset and the sliders. Value is preserved throughout, so colourful variation never dismantles the large-mass hierarchy the block-in established.
That constraint is doing quiet work. Variation that ignores value turns a structured picture into noise, and it is the failure mode of most painterly filters.
- Broad Colour Patches, for large calm passages like sky and water.
- Broken Colour, the general case, closest to a classic impressionist handling.
- Loose Colour, for foliage, crowds and anything where exact shape matters less than energy.
- Fine Accents, for a focal area you want to carry more incident than its surroundings.
The seed makes choices repeatable
The same working copy, settings, engine version and seed produce the same arrangement of patches every time. Changing only the seed explores a different arrangement without sending anything to a model or a server.
This matters when you are painting from it. A reference that quietly rearranges itself between the morning and the afternoon is not a reference, and a study you liked can be regenerated at a larger size a week later and still be the same study.
Working from it
Print the block-in and keep the painterly reference on screen beside it. The block-in is what you trace and what tells you where the masses go. The painterly version is what you look at when deciding how much a passage should break up.
Painting the patches literally, one mark per capsule, produces a mechanical picture. They describe density and direction rather than individual brushstrokes, and they are most useful in the passages you were going to overwork anyway.
Your own picture, not somebody else's painting
A painterly preset interprets the photograph you gave it. It is not a copy of any particular painting, and Pacyra is not affiliated with or endorsed by any artist or estate.
Do not use the preset to misrepresent authorship, provenance or authenticity.