Painter 8 Power Tip:
Resetting the Clone Source
Jeremy Sutton
This tutorial is an answer to the following email I received from Joanie
Ford:
"When I am painting I mistakenly push the ALT key on the PC and that
turns my cursor into a cross hair. Then I get a green dot with a "1"
beside it. It looks like I am picking a cloning spot from another part
of the picture. I don't know how to get back to cloning as I was before
this happened. I would shut down the program and hope it would go away.
Now I think I just look under file, and see what I am using for my cloning
source. If you think I am confused, that is because I am. If you can understand
what I am saying and tell me what to do when that happens that would be
great. Thanks!"
Here is my answer to Joanie and anyone else who finds that they inadvertently get that annoying green dot and cross hairs that seems to ruin their cloning.
1. Normally when you open a source image, make a clone copy, and then
start using a clone brush on your copy (the destination image), you see
a small cross hair on your original source image indicating where the
clone brush is getting its color information. 
2. When you want to pick color from your image using the keyboard shortcut
for the Dropper tool you must make sure you are using a NON-CLONING brush.
With a regular non-cloning brush the keyboard shortcuts Option on Mac
or Alt on PC temporarily covert your brush cursor into the Dropper
tool for picking color. The problem arises when you use Option/Alt with
a CLONING brush selected. Instead of temprarily converting the cursor
into the Dropper tool, you instead inadvertently reset the clone source
start point. As you press the key your cursor changes into a cross hair.
When you click in the image a green dot and the number 1 appear momentarily
indicating the new starting point for cloning, which is now in your current
image. 
3. Now as you paint with the clone brush you see a cross hair in the
same image following your cursor around and the color you paint is being
taken from the position of the cross hair.
4. Obviously you can use this to your advantage when you wish to copy a section of an image into the same image. However if all you wanted to do was clone from one image to another then this can be annoying.
5. There are two steps to resolve this situation. The first is to choose
File > Clone Source and manually reset the clone source to the original
source image.
6. This first step alone still leaves you with a mis-correspondence between
the two images as you clone. The second step is to choose Restore Default
variant in the Brush Selector pop-up menu. 
You are now home and dry and can continue working happily!
Which Resources and Materials?
Whatever level of Painter user you are, you will definitely benefit from joining my new online education center www.PaintboxJ.com. In PaintboxJ you will find new video tutorials on Corel Painter 11 added monthly, and much more. The fastest way I can help you with Painter is for you join one of my in-person workshops. In terms of my instructional books and DVDs, I recommend starting off with my book, Painter X Creativity: Digital Artist's Handbook, and introductory DVD, Learning Corel Painter X with Jeremy Sutton. The book is a great complement to all my other materials and also serves as the required text book for all my classes. The book goes deeper and broader than any DVD. It also provides convenient step lists for many of the techniques shared on the DVDs. The Learning Corel Painter X DVD gives you a good overview of the software.
Once you are familiar with the basics then I recommend the more advanced DVD sets, How to Paint from Photographs Using Corel Painter X
and Expanding Your Creativity with Jeremy Sutton - The Art of Collage Portraiture. Both these more advanced DVD sets take you through real-life case studies from beginning to end, sharing my work-flow, organizational systems, creative process, decision-making strategies, techniques and tools, plus including extensive extra brushes, art materials, tutorial images and more. In both DVDs I show how I apply physical paint onto my prints.
The interface has not changed significantly between Painter X and Painter 11 so you can easily apply the lessons from all my earlier materials when using Corel Painter 11. Likewise my PaintboxJ Painter 11 tutorials can all be easily applied in earlier versions of Painter. I do strongly recommend upgrading to Painter 11 if you currently have an earlier version. The newest Painter is the best yet. It is significantly faster than earlier versions and includes a whole new class of wonderful brushes (the Hard Media brushes).
For information on other Painter resources out there, please explore the Links page.