Altering Brush Method With Captured Dabs Yields Interesting and Useful Results

 

One of the first things I do with any new brush, after putting it through it's paces without altering it; is changing the Method and /or Subcategory of the brush to a Digital Watercolour/Watercolor (I'm putting both spellings in once for search purposes. Using Canadian spelling for watercolour when searching on this site is much more effective!)

 

 

This is especially true if you have downloaded Custom brush sets from other people, like Skip Allen or David Gell. Before Painter 12 there were very few dabs (if any) like the new Fractal Dab shapes found in the new Real Watercolour and Real Wet Oils category.

 

Even though Painter 12 is a little skimpy in the Captured dab line, the addition of this dab and these two brush categories is a good start. This dab can be altered in many ways to be a very useful addition to the Watercolour Brush Repertoire.

 

Below is a comparison of the Captured dab found in Real Watercolours  and Real Wet Oils. I believe they a basically the same dab, so you can see how much variation you could can get without even altering it very much.

 

 

 

Below is an example from Skip's Splashing Water set  (can be obtained from Skip's website see left sidebar for link) which started out as one called Digital Splat Closed. It has much more variation in the shapes and values making it a good brush for a leafy irregular shape. Another good one to use is the captured dab in Splashing Water Splatter Dab Harsh. Below is the Dab Profile for each.

 

 

 

 

 

 How I am using this brush today - as a leafy irregular shape to express coniferous tree tops further back in the forest.

 

Well, I'm not getting too far with it because I'm writing this, but I thought if I just do demos and tutorials on how to achieve a certain brushmark from paintings I am working on, that I might be able to get more information across to you. Trying to demos whole paintings (which is very difficult for me because I'm still working out how to do so many things...like everyone else!) takes and enormous amount of time and effort.  It is not, perhaps the most useful or effective way to give you information that is helpful to your workflow and style.

 

I obviously reduced the opacity of the brush to do this and used two same colours of blue in a dark and a lighter value as my colour. To do this,:

 

• Chose Gradient from the Colour Variability Menu and Two Tone from the Gradient menu.
• Set the colours as mentioned above
• Make sure you are controlling where the stroke goes by changing the Expression to None from Random and turning off Jitter (if it was on) 
• Apply brushstrokes where you want the leafy area to be.
• Now CHANGE the brush's Subcategory from Digital Wet Abrasive to Digital Wet Remove Density
• Reduce the Size to fit within the edges, with space to spare to accomodate some diffusion.
• Reduce the Opacity to almost nil  (I used 5%)
• Set to Diffusion 1 -2 %
• Dab here and there on the edges of the Closed Splat shapes to blur and diffuse them, so you will have a combination of soft and hard edges.
  
• The hard edges should be the outside of the shape, I think, to express the irregular leaf shapes seen from a distance.

 

 The image below shows some strokes in a new document that have been softened and blurred with the new brush. You can see how increasing the Wet Fringe gives you back some of your edges by accentuating the ones you didn't blur.

 

 

 

 

This all looks like a lot of trouble for a few irregular leaf shapes in the background, but it is accomplished fairly quickly and easily with some degree of randomness of you use the very interesting Captured Dab shape that Skip has created this way.

 

Experiment and pay attention to what property it is about a brush that gives it the appearance you so desire .... and go for it!

 

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Stay tuned to see if this works out in the end. It may take a day or two to get there, so come back for a visit soon. 

 

Thanks for dropping by, and please don't forget you can email me privately from the Contact Form in the Left Sidebar and publically in the Comment Section at the end of each post. I sincerely welcome and encourage your comments and questions.

 

 

Do you have a brush tip for me that you would like to share? Drop me a line! I'll share it with everyone else too if you want.