Experimenting with watercolour

[FlytE]

I have been intrigued by alot of 'archived' posts i have been sifting through about traditional styles of imagery/rendering. One aspect that is flavour of the month with me just now is creating watercolour images. I had a stab at it when i had a free moment today and came up with this. Once i have had a little bit of c+cs etc and if anyone is interested, I may just write up a quick and easy tutorial on how i did it.

[Trevor Tizard]

That looks great..................I would love to know how you did that!

 

The only thing I'd like to be able to do is show the crossing pencil lines within the drawing. Do you think you could do that with the new version of Autocad by importing your model and using the new hand drawn rendering styles and applying it as a layer in Photoshop? Would be good if you could do that within Max/Viz/Vray etc.

 

Just a thought.

[ZFact]

yeah... looks good. would love to know how its done.

Is it all post work

[Ernest Burden III]

I thought I posted this earlier today...must not have hit 'submit'

 

Anyway, have you read this thread?

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=6873&highlight=watercolor

[FlytE]

I did a forum search for watercolour but I think i missed that one.... If I am being brutally honest, i personally think that 90% of images i saw posted didnt really look like a watercolour painting, although a couple very much did. If i get a spare moment, I might have a try myself at one or two of the images you posted.... and also post how i made the one above

[Ernest Burden III]

If I am being brutally honest, i personally think that 90% of images i saw posted didnt really look like a watercolour painting

 

Experiments are not always a success, and I think we discussed the limitations in that thread, though I don't remember specifics about it.

[FlytE]

true.... and I hold it against no one. The 'experiments' I made to get the above image dont look much like the final one.

[FlytE]

OK its been a long day so ill make this quick, any further questions ill get later on. Here is the process I went through to make the image above (Im not going to post specific values as it will likely be different for every image...):

 

Start with a render - it can be quite simple because small details will be lost in the ps work anyway.

 

1) Take the render layer and duplicate it 3 times

 

2) Apply a Conte Crayon filter to your bottom layer. This is to make the painting appear slightly textured and canvas like. Make it subtle, too much relief and it will look too forced.

 

3)Apply a watercolour filter to your second layer. Again subtle values to create a natural and slightly choppy change in colour/intensity - then change the overall layer style to screen.

 

4) Onto the third layer, this time the filter you apply can be one of several things - again whatever you think fits the type of scene you are making. I used the underpainting filterand once again made the third layer's style screen.

 

5) Select all these layers in the layer pallete, right click and group them into a smart object. The create an alpha mask for it.

 

6)Create a new layer and place it underneath your painting layer. Fill it white.

 

7) Select the brush tool (black colour) and your looking for a specific brush called 'Rough Round Bristle'. Select this brush and bring its strength down considerably (might need to play a bit with this to get it right) Using this brush in a left to right motion, mask off the layers creating a rough edge. It will not mask it fully unless you keep going over it a few times, dont do this though. Select the brush above it (called 'Wet Sponge') and mask again, this time overlapping the rough edge you just created this should mask away most of the rest and leave an impression of several washes.

 

8) Select a soft brush will low hardness and mask off some more areas within the painting that you want to be brighter (or to be exact, show more paper). Also, take the brush along the inside of your edge, but not touching the areas you have already masked off. This brings out the edges and gives the feeling of the paint gathering a little as it runs.

 

9) finally you want a layer underneath that shows a little bit of pencil lines. What I really wanted was for that to come through a little bit when i did the final soft masking of the painting layer. Personally i dont think that my sketch underlayer is all that good so im all ears for a better technique, but what i did was to render the same view using a white vrayedges diffuse map in the override material box in global switches. I then inverted the map in PS and put it through a couple of roughening filters, one of which was conte crayon. You can then use that as yoru underlayer and the sketching shoudl show through.

 

I hope this is of use to anyone, i will maybe write another tut later when I look into actual real life painting techniques in more detail. That one will probably contain reference images

[Ray]

Thanks for sharing! I'll give it a try.