How to Paint Big Coniferous Trees with Digital Watercolours

How to Paint Big Coniferous Trees with John Derry’s Watercolour Brushes

Open a 7 x 5 in. 200 dpi document.
Open a new layer and make sure you have Preserve Transparency OFF and PickUp Underlying Colour ON.

3. Squeeze your Gel Wash brush a bit and point it upwards to make a jagged up and down kind of stroke, and paint in the first layer of trees. You won’t be able to see your strokes very well, but it doesn’t matter because the next step reveals them.

4. Turn Pick Up Underlying Colour OFF and turn Preserve Transparency ON.

5. You can squeeze your Wet Blender a bit the same as the Gel Wash if you want, vary it and vary the direction of strokes and you’ll see that you can different amounts of paint and use the ‘visual language’ of the jagged edges. Just catching the edges with the Wet Blender brush looks cool. Experiment!!

Putting Some Whites Back (optional)

6. If you want to put some tiny white marks back in (if you managed to paint too heavily and not leave any), the best way is to do little teensy lasso’s (selections) and Edit Cut. Don’t get carried awaythough. Study traditional watercolour paintings and look for the 'visual language' of watercolour as John Derry describes it andput some of this in your paintings, but not too much of any one thing or it looks too contrived.

7. You can erase around your edges, blur a bit, and above all add some other colours. I used turquoise and gold to warm up the trees.

That's basically the technique. I switch back and forth between brushes and layers to add more jagged edges in the trees to look like some branches.