Building Colour with digital watercolour variants on separate layers in Painter 11

 

 

This slide is one from my eBook in progress, How to Paint Watercolours Digitally. It illustrates a simple exercise designed to show you that building colour using the DWC brushes works differently when you add the colour on separate Layers or paint all three colours on one Layer. Using a Pure Water brush, 3 colours and 9 layers and gradually building the colours gives you a more luminescent look than all the colours applied on the one layer because digital watercolour  doesn't work like real paint and paper. The last colour you put on in digital watercolour covers the previous colours applied. In traditional watercolour all the painting is done on the same layer. The differences occur in the staining and transparency qualities of a certain colour, the strength of the wash (how much pigment is in it) and whether the previous layers are completely dry, partially wet, or very wet.