Digital watercolour painting techniques to share with you

Digital watercolour painting techniques to share with you

Today's techniques build on how I showed you to do the coniferous trees a short time ago. How To Paint Coniferous Trees with Digital Watercolours

The same methods using John Derry's Watercolour brushes to lay in a grainy greenish wash start things off. The illustration shows the Tracker and the order of brush use. Shown on the Layers Palette, it is the Background green layer. Don’t forget to start with the Pick Up Underlying Colour box checked to do the Gel Wash, then unclick it and click the Preserve Transparency box. As you paint on this area with the Wet Blender or Wet Rough, you will notice the paint only goes where the Gel Wash is, and that the amount of colour showing can be varied by moving the brush around in different directions.

The darker, softer greens in varing colours and amounts were done with Skip Allen's Softwater Dab, which are available on the PainterTalk Forum (I highly recommend you join this free site if you are interested in learning to paint digitally. There is a link in my blogroll.)

As you can see in the Tracker, I used a Wedge Simple Water (my custom made) to paint the first tree on a new layer with Pick Up Underlying Colour box checked. All I did was squeeze the Simple Water Brush in the Brush Control Setting Angle, the direction can be varied and the wet fringe adjusted in the Digital Watercolour brush controls.

These illustrations show the Brush Control Settings I used for this brush, I varied the angle, the size, and the colours of course as I painted the branches on the coniferous tree. It would be comparable to holding a watercolour brush at a different angle with your hand and having more or less paint and water on the brush etc...

I'm out of time for now, but will continue this later today!

Later...

Now where was I? Ahh! I forgot to mention this, but I did capture a zoomed in view of the trees and how to pick the paper texture earlier. I use a program called SnagIt to make these cool little diagrams of snippets from my canvas and my screen. I try to position things so you can get as much info as possible from each capture. For example I will often include the Layers Palette, or specific brush controls in the capture. If they are there it’s usually for a reason even if I don’t point it out in the text.

No discussion about watercolour whether it is digital or traditional is complete without some mention of the paper used. It matters if you don’t pick a paper texture when you start your painting because it will default to Artist’s Basic Paper (which isn’t bad for watercolour, just not as authentic in appearance). It really affects the appearance of the paint on the paper in watercolour. Experiment with some washes on different papers and you’ll see what I mean. I have used the French Watercolour Paper in the Paper Textures Palette in this painting because I like it’s slightly softer looking texture for water, especially still water. Too many bumps on the paper make it look rippled or wavy when you don’t want it to.