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Digital Watercolour Painting Tips - Reducing the amount of paint on the paperHow to lighten the whole watercolour layer by reducing the opacity of the layer If you feel you have painted it too dark or too intense, or planned to lighten it from the beginning, this is easy to do. Simply reduce the opacity of the layer in the Layers Palette. There are a number of other ways to lighten areas and/or erase paint. I will add them to this post as I come across them in my painting today.
 Copyright Joan A Hamilton
Using The Erasers in Digital Watercolour Paint Technique Another way to reduce the amount of paint on the paper is to use the eraser. That might sound patently too easy a method, especially when you consider that eraser's can be configured to remove a lot of paint or a little. There are also eraser's that work specifically in the Digital Watercolour and Wet Watercolour Brush variants. I don't tend to use them very much because my paintings are a mixture of brush variants and various stages of wet and dry and it just gets too complicated.
 Copyright Joan A Hamilton
The Wet Watercolour variants do not like to be erased. They tend to involuntarily widen the to be erased area into a larger square and erase more than you want to. See below for an example of this. This happens even when using a tiny brush.  Copyright Joan A Hamilton
Moving Wet Watercolour Paint Around
Traditional watercolourists use many techniques to alter the paint already on the paper. In painting watercolours digitally we can employ various brushes and techniques to emulate these.
One of my favourite ways to move wet paint is to use Skip Allen's Splashing Water WC Pencil Blender Wet with white paint to push the underlying coloured paint aside. In the illustration below I have painted the snow a violet shade with a WC Square Damp Brush. Then I used the
WC Pencil Blender Wet with white paint to make it look like there were some lines in the snow indicating darker shadows. The paint actually was pushed from the center outwards by the WC Pencil Blender Wet Brush, leaving the center smoother and lighter in colour and the edges darker. I believe it would be like adding some clear water in a traditional watercolour painting.
 Copyright Joan A Hamilton Related postsCommentsAdd a comment |
Skip Allen said:
Hey Joan,
Have you tried Loaded Water from the Real Watercolor 2 set? It will really move the paint to the side and you can get back to the white of the paper. I use it as an eraser, too. You don't get the dreaded squares with it, but it is a little harder to control.
Loved this article...you have such great tips on your site.
Skip