Watercolor techniques

[Alison K. Rathbun]

I have been working with SU for over a year now; my clients so far happy with the output of the program as it is. However, today I got a request by a new potential client for examples with a hand sketch / watercolor look. To show what I could do on the fly, I used one of SU's line styles and Photoshoped the rest to make it look more watercolor, the result of which can be seen below.

 

I have seen examples on this forum of other watercolor pictures and I would like to know how it was done. Is there a tutorial somewhere? What programs did were used? Just Photoshop? Painter? Would it be beneficial to take a watercolor class?

 

-Alison

[katkatemos]

I would suggest you to try piranesi, autodesk impressions, vray toons or cinema 4d. There are a lot of great softwares that can achieve a manually rendered scene. But if the option is just among the following: photoshop or corel painter, then I would choose corel painter.

 

Studying water color is another option but studying a software, for me, is much more convenient. Some people are born with the talent in painting, unfortunately, I am not one of them. If you got the time to invest on it, why not?

[M V]

Grant Marshall is the father of using SketchUp in combination with Painter / Photoshop to achieve digital watercolor illustrations. There is a very long running thread on the SketchUp groups about his techniques. Search "Grant Marshall Watercolor" in the Google SU Groups. Also, look up "Dennis Technique" in the groups as well. These tutorials are a great start.

 

I highly recommend learning traditional watercolor basics first. How can you replicate watercolor without understanding the medium first? Painter is an amazing program, but you really need to understand traditional art techniques to get the most out of it. Grant Marshall is the father of using SketchUp in combination with Painter / Photoshop to achieve digital watercolor illustrations. There is a very long running thread on the SketchUp groups about his techniques. Search "Grant Marshall Watercolor" in the Google SU Groups. Also, look up "Dennis Technique" in the groups as well. These tutorials are a great start.

 

I highly recommend learning traditional watercolor basics first. How can you replicate watercolor without understanding the medium first? Painter is an amazing program, but you really need to understand traditional art techniques to get the most out of it.

[upshot]

I've seen some impressive results by simply saving the SU scene with black squiggly lines of your choice (with depth cue of course ;-) then exporting to kerkythea applying some materials and doing a very quick GE render... Then take the Kerky rendering into PS and 'loosen it up' a bit with filters and blur, and lay the black line SU image over it (multiply layer).