Gel Wash/Wet Blender Watercolour Technique with Corel Painter

Gel Wash/Wet Blender Technique

You will need John Derry’s Watercolour Brushes to get the random roughened edges, but this technique works using the default Painter Digital Watercolour brushes and other brushes as well.

Open a new layer and using this Gel Wash/Wet Blender technique paint a darkish blue wash over the whole page with the Gel Wash set to a large brush. Try not to overlap strokes too much and don't go over previous strokes. Think of doing a wash with a large brush in traditional watercolour and use the same actions.

Your settings should be similar to the ones pictured below. I have highlighted areas that are specific to this technique.

Gel Wash/Wet Blender Technique Screen shots:

Illustration 1 In Gel Wash/Wet Blender Technique

Illustration 2 In Gel Wash/Wet Blender Technique

In the above step I unclicked Pick Up Underlying Colour, and clicked Preserve Transparency. This has the effect of masking the areas painted with the Gel Wash. The paint on the Wet Blender brush will only go there. You will find moving the Wet Blender brush in different directions will give you different values of your chosen colour. This helps give it a more authentic traditional watercolour appearance. You can introduce new colours, as if you were dropping them in with a wet brush. You can pull white in from going outside the painted area. You can use the Wet Soften Brush to remove some colour and soften edges...experiment and play around with these brushes on a separate paper to see what they will do. Then when you use them with what you have already painted you will get some effects you might not have expected, but really like! There you go, some randomness, the hallmark of traditional watercolours.