Using Layers in Digital Watercolour Painting

This illustration shows how I have 3 layers. I moved them each slightly to make it possible to see each one. It is critical to painting watercolours digitally to be able to use Layers effectively.

- When adding another element to your watercolour, do it on a new layer, then if you don’t like it you can delete the layer.

- The Watercolour layer can be lightened, darkened, softened, moved, warped, and transformed in other ways. I usually stick to just adjusting the brightness and contrast and sometime the dye concentration. I figure if traditional watercolourist can use a tissue and blot some colour off, then it is fair game if I use these tools!

- You used to be able to use blender brushes on the WC layer if you did any of the above things first in Painter 9, but Painter 11 makes you drop the WC layer to Canvas first, before you can use regular Blender brushes to blend, smudge, or diffuse.

This illustration shows how I painted the tree tops that had more detail in them.

I used the Digital watercolour variant Fine Tip Water which I had squeezed a bit and adjusted the fringe level on. Varying size, and the direction of the angle I painted in various trees and blended them very slightly with the Simple Blender brush. Just barely touch the spot you wanted to blend. The idea is to leave enough detail to see the trees and blend enough to suggest more. If you blend too much you will lose the definition. If you have done all this on a new layer and messed it up, you can delete it and start over! Believe me I do this a lot! I can’t imagine getting to a certain point in a traditional watercolour, then messing it up with blending the trees too much! I know this happens and that managing to paint without erasers and delete makes the skill of traditional watercolourists who do this awesome!

I used a tiny eraser with reduced opacity and the Straight Line Stroke tool to erase where the water meets the shore. I will smudge this a bit and paint on top of it later.

This is kind of a cheater method to get mirror like reflections! Traditional artists will be derisive possibly, and dead painters will turn over in their graves at this trick, but I don’t give a hoot, it’s my painting and if I want to use my medium this way it would hold me back not to. I tried to do it at a point that it wouldn’t be a total replica, and I expect I’ll figure out a way to do it that is a little less reliant on technology and more an indication of my painting skills.

Select the tree and sky you want to have reflected with the Lasso Tool, copy it, paste it in place, transform by flipping vertical and there you have it! Instant reflections! Lol! That saved me a lot of time didn’t it! It is on its own layer now, so you can lighten it, soften it, diffuse the edges a bit and make it look like a reflection in the water, not a pasted top half of the painting!