Lady Slipper's Featured and Tips on Using Digital Watercolours
The three paintings of the deep rose Lady Slipper's grouping were the first three I sold to someone I didn't know, at an Arts and Crafts Show in my condo building two years ago. They were framed in an Ikea Erikslund frame that I had taken apart and added my prints to. She really loved them and hung them over her bed. It was such an amazing feeling that someone got such joy out of something I created.
Before that most of the pleasure I received was in the doing and sharing with family mostly, (pre-website) and the idea that people who didn't necessarily love me (and not want to hurt my feelings) could like my art that much was an empowering sort of revelation.
An emotional block holding me back has been that I don't have any art or computer training. In some ways this has been a positive thing because it forced me to figure out how to make the kind of marks I wanted to make on the digital canvas! Right from the beginning my goal was to paint the picture myself starting with a blank canvas using the the digital brushes (such as pastels, tinting tools, pencils, blenders, and erasers of course. I started out with these brushes because they are easier to control. For the first year or so I didn't get too far with the Digital Watercolour and Watercolour Brushes in Corel Painter 9.5 In fact every time I tried them I got extremely frustrated because they were so difficult to work with. I thought maybe the problem was that I didn't know how to paint with virtual watercolours either.
Some things I wish I had learned early on in the process of learning to paint digitally
A couple of things I did wrong, and/or didn't know for a long time that impacted on this. I'll share them here in case you are making the same mistakes.
- Trying to paint in too high a resolution (like 600 -900 dpi) thinking that would make my prints clearer. When I started painting at 200 dpi, I suddenly found that both types of watercolour brushes worked a lot better! Everything was in a better scale.
- I discovered that dropping the watercolour layer dried it, and I could blend it, diffuse it, smudge it etc. I also learned, that using an Effect such as altering the Brightness/Contrast on the watercolour layer made it possible to blend, smudge etc without dropping it.
- I discovered that I could change the General brush settings on some brushes to Wet (pastels, pencils, charcoal, airbrushes, Seurat for example), and using a very light colour could get different wettish looks. Some brushes will only paint dark when set to wet. You have to experiment! You have to experiment! You have to experiment!
- The biggest breakthrough was when I started to get a bit of a handle on the digital watercolour brushes. I figured out that once you dried them, they could be blended and used with the other media, such as the digital pastels and watercolour airbrushes. I also started experimenting with the digital watercolour blenders and diffusers.
- If you are the kind of person who jumps in and starts doing it you might not figure out a few things for awhile...there is sooooo much to learn and have fun with!! If you follow some kind of organized plan for learning how to paint digitally you may learn important brush characteristics earlier than I did!
Posted in Miscellaneous. Updated February 12th, 2011.
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