Some General Tips on Painting Digital Watercolours
Some General Tips on Painting Trees in Digital Watercolours
1. Other captured dabs not from this set would be appropriate too. I like the dabs in the Splashing Water set a lot. Digital Closed and Open Splatter come to mind. Try them to add texture and shape to your watercolours.
- Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas to experiment with! The point of this is to give you a starting off point. You will go on and develop your own style of painting trees.
- Remember to use lots of layers in your watercolours and do use a mixture of Wet Watercolours, Digital Watercolours and the new Real Watercolours in your paintings. They each have different properties that enable you to paint the varied shapes and edges you’ll want in your trees.
- Don’t be afraid to drop all your layers (or if you are, make a clone and blend on it) and do some blending to accent certain areas and soften others. Don’t make it all blended in, or the eye kind of loses interest (if you know what I mean lol!).
- To make your textures more cohesive and authentic, use the technique to wet the canvas very slightly. It helps get rid of those flat blended or overly diffused areas.
- Remember your tree is not one dimensional and will need areas of light and shadow. Decide where the light is coming from and paint the undersides and edges where the sky holes are darker. My diagrams and videos show a way to get you started with brushes that will help you do this.
- Practice doing it. You will soon start to get the hang of it.
- Observe the trees around you closely and paint the branches somewhat realistically, but much simplified. There are many resources on the internet for ways to paint trees in watercolour. Whether you are painting digitally or not, they will give you a better understanding on how to paint trees.
- I have only demonstrated a couple of kinds of trees here, there are obviously many more to be painted!
There will be an article on painting trees with digital watercolours in September 2011's issue of Digital Paint Magazine. I'm working on it now.
Here's an excerpt (besides the general tips above):
Whew! Sorry about all the different fonts everyone. That's what happens when you post things from here and there. I never seem to be able to pick the right size font in Word to paste text into my blog. If only I could remember bigger at least! Too bad FolioTwist doesn't support 'post to blog' from Word. It would make is faster to do.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Updated September 20th, 2011.
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