Another venture into abstract painting. Only the paint brush was used with two alphas and the drag rectangle stroke, sometimes with ZAdd on and sometimes off. 100% ZBrush.
Then I couldn’t resist having a little tweak. The image was exported to Paint Shop Pro and the Virtual Painter plugin was applied (impasto preset) to produce this version.
I like the muted palette-and the virtual painter filter is pretty cool.
Hi Flycatcher
I think you can make the same effect in Zbrush.
For exemple
1 drawing the “wish pattern” with any tools brush
2 make an alpha
3 take the normal brush + your new alpha
4 make the Z% intensitity as you want >0 
5 rgb off M on
6 brushing on your original picture with “Draw Rect” or “Free Hand”
That’s all !
Have happy zbrushing 
Pilou
A Quick exemple “al pasta dante”
You right, i don’t reproduce gradient 
but it’s abstract #3
I have no’t seen it, because my glasses were lost at this time! Just seen “spaghetti”
After form , You must now apply a filter !
So I shall try find a better filter
Sure one of the Cameyo filter ! http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=008036
Pilou abstract
Nice work! I did something similar some time ago when EZ put me on the transparency. I was so facinated that I just went wild. I like your experiments, You can learn so much from them 
Thanks guys for your interest in this simple experiment.
Frenchy: Brave try - I would never have thought of attempting this irregular impasto stroke in ZBrush. Thanks for reminding me of Cameyo’s filters - I downloaded them in my early days when I was swamped with the backlog of hundreds of posts I was grabbing, and still haven’t got around to looking at them. I suspect you are right; it probably would be possible to produce something like it in ZBrush with alphas and z-intensity settings, but I think it would be very time-consuming to apply in a convincing irregular manner, and with the slight colour gradients implying the variable thickness of the “paint”. The beauty of the Virtual Painter plugin is that it is a one-click operation (or a few clicks if you want to fine-tune the options) - and not being a Z-purist, I’m all in favour of the most efficient approach, all other things being equal.