Watercolour Still Life of Pears done with digital watercolour brushes

Watercolour Still Life of Pears done with digital watercolour brushes ( First Published 24/10/08 on my Wordpress Blog)

Yesterday's version Oct.24

Today's version with darkened shadows Oct. 25

This painting was done entirely from scratch on a blank canvas using the watercolour brushes in Corel Painter 9.5. I used only wet brushes and the digital watercolours on this one to try and end up with a watercolour look. I did not add a watercolour texture as an effect as I found it makes the print colour seem to go browner and blurry looking. Used the Italian Watercolour paper as the paper, but not as an additional effect. I printed it on Red River Placid Lite paper which is a Semi Gloss. I used the ICC profile (for the Epson Stylus Photo R1800 Printer) provided on the Red River Website instead of the Epson Semi Gloss one. I reduced the dye concentration to 94 and 50 % twice to lighten it, and slightly increased the brightness and decreased the contrast very slightly to make the print clearer. I am painting at a much lower resolution than I used to, and find the brushes work better. Usually I use a 200 -300 dpi resolution to paint and sometimes increase the resolutuion to 600 dpi for printing.

When I tried to print on my Epson Radiant Watercolour paper today it kept causing a paper jam. Also had to change three of the colour cartridges today, and I suppose it was just too much to ask! I hope it doesn't mean that my printer won't print on thicker papers now.

This is the sketch with the beginning layers. I started with digital watercolour washes and watercolour airbrushes glazes to build up the colour of the pears and the shadows around them. I used a custom digital watercolour diffuser blender to blend the dig wc (digital watercolour), but did not blend the darker wet airbrush glazes at all. The next illustration continues with this, in addition to some leaky pen brown speckles, and fine tip dig wc work for the blemishes on the pears.