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Thread: Watercolor WIPs- Sharing and Learning

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  1. #13
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Posts
    601
    Did these pears in the DAA class I'm taking. I'm mostly working on getting good dry textures when I want them and good wet into wet effects. I'm also playing with just using the Settings Panel more aggressively, instead of using quite so many layers. For example, I would sometimes lay down some wet into wet colors (like on the red and green pear), and then hit the Instant Dry toggle, reduce the loading, and lay down a rough dry edge to the brush stroke here and there, then blend in with Tiny Frost or something approaching it in the Settings. This might be something I would normally do with a couple of layers, but here I did it in one. You can see it around the edges of the pears, mostly on the bottoms.

    Of course, I'm still a layer whore, so I must have used 10-15 for these pears alone!!! LOL.

    Another fun thing I tried out that's related was to lay down color, toggle Instant Dry, lay down a new color on the same layer, then blend the two only on the edge. This lead to a relatively convincing "back bleed" where it looks like the two colors are only truly mixing at an edge. You can see this on the yellow pear in the shadows around the stem, for instance, as well as just above it where the brown shadow bleeds into the yellow, and we get a little rim of green.

    The other thing I did was import a nice textural watercolor image first, before anything else, desaturate it, set it to Overlay, dial down its Opacity a bit, and moved it to the top of the layers. Then all my painting occurred under it. This allowed me to get some very nice mild textures in real time as I painted. I see the benefits most easily in the cast shadow of the yellow pear, which I find subtly more convincing in the final image with the Overlay. It's just, IMO, too smooth in the image with no Overlay.

    Finally, I also used the Splatter sticker spray from the Art category to put a bit of "pepper" on the fruit. Then I dialed it down to let it be very mild. I shamelessly admit :P that I stole this from Someonesane's post in the first thread I linked to in my Tut #1-- its from last years DAA class, where they also made pears. You can see some other examples there.

    The class has been fun so far, and I'm glad I'm taking it.

    I've included down at the bottom a version of the painting without the importing texture image Overlay, just to give a sense of what it's providing. Of course, it lightens the image, but more important to me is that it adds just a bit of grit.
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    Last edited by Steve B; 04-16-2012 at 04:05 AM.

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