Incorporating Dry Brushes Into Your Digital Watercolour Workflow

This concept gives me a little bit of trouble as a digital watercolourist.

I really try to use only the watercolour variants in my paintings.

I sketch in pencil, which sometimes ends up staying.
I occasionally use liquid ink for splashing water.
I use a few dry airbrushes sometimes for a certain look.
Sometimes a fine ink pen works best for a branch
I have even been known to use a Glow Brush to take colour off

But, when I found out how fun and easy it was to make fluffy grey clouds with the Dry Gel Fractal I couldn't resist it. I rationalized by saying it is only a tiny part of the painting, and it will be dropped and lifted to a watercolour layer...so it's okay to use it!

*sigh* It's not much different than dropping a watercolour layer and doing a little dry blending before lifting back to a watercolour layer.

In the illustration below the sky and clouds had already been painted using wet watercolours and digital watercolours. I could have done the grey clouds with WC variants, but they always seem to blend in and not give me a two dimensional layered look.

After trying it again with a Fractal Digital WC and DWC Soft Blender I noticed that it was easier to control the Opacity of the Gel Brush as opposed to the Digital Watetrcolour brush. (The opacity slider works the same, that's not what I mean). If I kept the opacity low on the Gel brush it makes a slightly opaque looking stroke that can be varied to look like the different layers you see in clouds.

Also, if you blend it (very carefully) with a soft low opacity Just Add Water Blender, while it's still on it's own layer, you can make it appear more transparent in places. It seems to sit on top of the other layers.

This little screen shot below shows a DWC on the left and a Gel brush on the right.

I used the same colour for both and each was on it's own layer. No blending. The Gel brush keeps it's fractal edge better too.

Anyway, it's worth experiementing with.