Painting a Sky Wash and Some Storm Clouds with Digital Watercolours - Includes Custom Staple Brushes
There are six (plus one) of my custom digital watercolour brushes in this post with screen captures of the brush settings and two (plus one) useful TIPS.
This is just a quick study of some stormy clouds on a blue sky to:
- Demonstrate how to do a simple watercolour wash
- Demonstrate how much an added layer using digital watercolours and blending techniques can add to your clouds.
- How to shape and blend to bring them from a flat, featureless blob to clouds with drama, shape and dimension.
- Included will be some custom brush settings to help you on your way.
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
- This Grainy Soft Wash Brush had it's origins in Skip Allen's Watercolour (the pink flower ones) Soft Wash brush. You can begin with that brush and change the settings to the ones here to give you a simple smooth wash brush. I use this brush quite a bit because it's a good one to use with a colour gradient, or to put one colour on top of another without leaving edges I don't want in my painting.
- In this study used the Swimming Pool Gradient (on a fairly low Opacity setting) fairly large (about 80) and paint using downward strokes from top to a third of the way down lightening the pressure on your stroke as you go down. Then with a smaller brush and the Dusky Sky Gradient chosen I painted on top of this on the top layer of sky and some under the cloud bottoms.
TIP: How to Use a Gradient as a Colour:
Chose gradient in Colour Variability and then chose Swimming Pool from the media gradient panel. Or chose a two colour gradient and pick your own two colours.
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
- The Fractal Wet Density Remove Brush is an essential tool of mine. It is comparable to using a soft sponge that removes paint. It can have hard or soft edges depending on the opacity. The size and shape can be altered to give more variety. Used carefully and judiciously it can give some of the same effects we see in traditional watercolours when tissues, or wet clean water is applied. The point is to not take all the watercolour paint off when painting clouds. Leaving some will help add colour and dimension.
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
- This view has the Digital watercolour layer in it as well. As you can see it is on a new layer and doesn't touch the watercolour layer in any way. If this was a traditional watercolour I would have to worry about picking up underlying colour and the wetness of my brush and paper. Because this is the fabulous world of Digital Watercolour you have the advantage of not having to worry about this.
- Using the Digital Square Pool Blender Mine I blocked in some strokes of grey on the bottom of the cloud and blended it down into the blue sky area towards the bottom of the paper with my DWC WIW Blender (settings to follow)
- Using the Squeezed Lt Dig Square Pool Blender I pulled the grey paint around in places and pulled in a little blue from the sky to make a focal point.
- More shaping with DWC Flat Grainy Stump and softening with DWC WIW Blender, especially in the focal point.
- Below is a view of the study at this stage with the Watercolour Layer turned off and the Digital Watercolour layer only showing. There are only two layers and the canvas in this, as you can see from the Layers Palette in the illustrations.
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
My Custom Digital Watercolour Wet Into Wet Blender - Brush Settings
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
My Favourite Digital Watercolour Blender
- This is one of my staple brushes and I use it in various ways in my painting process. It is one that I change the diffusion amount on quite often, as well as the size. You might have better results calibrating it to your own pressure levels, although I have included mine here.
TIP: When blending and softening edges don’t get too carried away with it. If you leave a variety of edges and blends of colours it will look more like wet watercolours.
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
- Digital Watercolour Flat Grainy Stump is a brush I have mentioned many times in my tutorials. I'll reiterate here. It is very useful for adding tiny details and fixing small areas because it pulls the pixels around. It will work if you use it larger as well, but you will end up with a big flat area in your watercolour, so try to confine it to very small areas. I used it to correct some tiny detail in the focal point.
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
TIP: Wetting your watercolour and applying a surface texture can add an authentic look to your digital watercolour, but sometimes makes it look muddy if added when printed on a slightly textured paper, so always keep a copy that isn't wet. I like to post ones that are wet
- Some final touches were done to show you the final textures.
- Drop all the layers to the Canvas, make sure they are dried
- Increase Canvas size to 200 dpi
- Chose Italian Watercolour Paper from the Paper Palette
- From Effects Menu Chose Apply Surface Texture- apply the settings in the diagram Surface Texture Settings for Italian Watercolour Texture
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
- Lift Canvas to the Watercolour Layer from the Layers Menu
- Using a Custom Wet Watercolour Light Brush, Wet Entire Watercolour Layer from the Layers Menu. You might have to do it two or three times.
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
Copyright Joan A Hamilton - September 2011
Six plus 1 (added later) Brush Control Settings Shown in Screen Captures in this post.
Fractal Wet Density Remove
Digital Square Pool Blender Mine
Squeezed Lt Dig Square Pool Blender
DWC Flat Grainy Stump
DWC WIW Blender
Wet Watercolour Light
Email me if you have any questions!
Still working on my Watercolour Basics Brushes
Posted in Demonstration of Painting Digital Watercolours Technique. Updated October 13th, 2011. 8 comments so far.
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Skip Allen said:
Joan,
Wonderful tutorial. You are so generous with your knowledge. You are the Queen of digital watercolor, too. Your work is always stunning.