blaquekat:

So, I’m no stranger to water color techniques in photoshop, but I wanted to work on a new set of textures/brushes etc. The key to a water color effect in photoshop is the right paper texture and, find edges and the right blurring brush. 

Here’s my ideal goal

So, this is just a very basic very specific watercolory look. I’m actually going to take aspects of this particular image and try to use it as the starting point for this brush/process. So first I’m going to crop out the white space above the flowers, desaturate it, and define a new pattern. 

After making the first starting pattern, I’m going to make a new file and fill a layer with the entire texture just to see how that would look

Our starting point is really good! It’s almost seamless. Now I’m going to use the stamp tool and even out the texture. 

So i’ve evened the texture out and I’m going to define this pattern and repeat the previous step just to make sure that everything’s ok. Then i’m going to up the contrast. 

So now I have 2 options to play with

Using the darker texture I made, I place the paper texture at the very top and set it on color burn. I fill a layer below it for the color of the paper and then I make a layer on top of it for where I’ll be painting. If you want to do straight up white paper using the lighter one and setting the texture layer to multiply will work better

Now we’re going to make the brush shape! I open a new file and using only black I’m going to do a roundish brush with slight specks to make it a bit less contained as water color isn’t supposed to necessarily be a medium that is contained. 

I actually decided to use one of my last brushes I designed to design the brush shape for this brush. I’m going to keep this file open because I might end up changing this. I define the brush preset and start messing around with the settings

I surprised myself with how quickly I was able to figure this out! You see where the brush started, very uniform and boring. I first played with the spacing, then I turned on the transfer settings, and then I played with the scatter settings which really helped give more of a water colory feel. Then I turned on shape dynamics so that the size of the line will be changed based on the pressure I used. Then Finally within the shape dynamics I increased the minimum diameter a bit so that it wasn’t quite as severe. I made brushes of the last three strokes as they’re all going to be very helpful in the creation of a water color effect. 

Something else that really helps enhance the effect of the water color look is turning on your color dynamics. This will help your brush look a bit more realistic. The key to using this is foreground/background jitter.What you do is your put whatever color you want to use as your foreground color and whatever the paper color is as your background color. Depending on your pressure it will give an impression of paint being washed over the paper and the color of the paper showing through. This isn’t necessary but sometimes it helps with certain areas of a painting. For the next step just use a brush without color dynamics as the results are much better

Since I’m fairly happy with these brushes right now i"m just going to move to the final step which would be find edges. Finding edges really  sells this look. What you do is you duplicate your paint layer and you use the filter find edges on that duplicated layer and set it that layer to multiply. This will give the impression of paint drying and pigment collecting on the sides. 

Now you’re going to create another brush to be used to smudge the paint. You’re going to make a spotted brush

Turn on transfer, specking and shape dynamics. Play around with the settings a little bit. Using the smudge tool on the paint layer you can drag the paint for a bleeding feel

Alll that combined should give the desired look!

Left was the goal, right was what I did digitally. Keep in mind, when you’re water color painting you use different brushes. I used one brush for mine and it was a bit finer than I’m sure the artist used for this image. So yeah! 

But I hope this was helpful! I love making posts like this so if you like them let me know!! Also if you have any traditional media you’d like to see me make digital I’d looove to get a challenge!?