Shoppe Tips & Tricks – Digi Watercolor!

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Fall is in the air – and I’m sooooooo excited – for so many reasons!  First of all, I really dislike summer.  Honestly people.  It just gets too darn hot where I live!  I’m way more of a fall girl – I just love the cooler air and wearing long sleeves (which I’ll get to do by NOVEMBER, LOL).  I’m also a HUGE college football fan…and hubby and I just got our first football fix of the season this weekend!  And finally, my daughter’s birthday is in early October.  And every year when her birthday rolls around – I’m just so ready to CELEBRATE!

This year I’m planning a princess tea party for my soon-to-be six year old.  For the invitations,  I decided I wanted to go “back to my roots” from my paper scrapping days and resurrect my most favorite technique – watercolor!  As a paper stamper, I would hand-doodle my titles and journaling, or even accent with rubber stamps, and then color them in with watercolors (pencils and/or crayons, readily available at craft and art stores!)  And just because I love you all so much, I actually brushed the dust off my old paper supplies and whipped up a little sample for you!

Traditional Watercolor

{supplies:  Watercolor Wonder crayons, rubber stamp by Stampin’ Up.  Water brush is readily available at craft stores (can’t remember the brand of mine, sorry!)

Watercolor is imperfect, even messy if you like it that way (I obviously do, LOL!).  Perfect for the mood I’m trying to create for her whimsical tea party!

I’ve been playing with brushes in Photoshop for some time now, trying to find the best combination of settings to yield the best watercolor effect – and I found something I’m really pleased with!  I found the new brush organization in CS5 to be really helpful (I was previously using CS3), not to mention new default brushes.  But to make sure that today’s little tutorial works for EVERYONE, I stuck with a basic round brush for my project!  So everything you see here will work in PS and PSE :)

So what will we be making today?  This invitation!  Here it is, before the watercolor has been added:

First lets cover the basics of how I created the card:

• I created a blank layout at 4 in. wide x 6 in. high.  I always do my invitations at this size because it’s a cheap, easy standard size to have printed (or to even print myself!).  And I find it to be perfect for holding all of that critical information about the big event!
• I assembled the invitation by using papers and ribbon from the Occasions collection, then added {slightly re-colored} sequins from An Affair to Remember.
• Fonts are soooo important when creating an invitation!  I wanted a whimsical font that would be playful and easy to read for the  main text of the invitation, then I utilized a hand-written font for the party details.  Most importantly, I was looking for doodles I could color in to add that perfect touch of “princess” and “tea party” to my invitation!  In an earlier post I showed how to use fonts to customize your project, and in this case – I found two perfect doodle fonts, available for just a few dollars online!  (Full font credits are in the invitation posting at the Shoppe Gallery.)

I think it looks cute as-is…but I’m ready to WATERCOLOR…digi-style!!

Digital Watercolor

As I mentioned earlier, there are MANY brushes that make great watercolor brushes for our purpose today.  CS5 and Elements have dry brushes, wet brushes, chalk, pastels, etc.  So be sure to spend a little time just PLAYING with your brushes!  This is the best way to discover what you really like.  This is one technique, however, that requires a pen tablet.  I normally use the mouse pad right on my laptop for scrapping, but find that the only way to really “paint” is to use a pen.  So now would be a great time to check into the inexpensive entry level pen tablets out there!  I have a basic 4×6 tablet and find that it works great for all of these occasional use projects.

Workspace Setup

• I created a color palette that contains the “paint” colors I want to work with.  I selected the pink right from the papers with the eyedropper tool, then used a hard round brush to stamp a dot in each color.  Then I selected the coordinating green and yellow from the color picker tool and repeated the process of stamping the dots.
• Just add water.  Ok, not really!  Watercolor relies on water to dilute the concentration of the color, yielding the awesome, imperfect variations throughout the image.  To mimic this digitally, you need to reduce the opacity of your brush.  I generally keep it below 50%, because as you’ll see, I like to paint in layers.
• Know your keyboard shortcuts.  It will come in super handy with this technique! for each of these shortcuts, just hit the key on the keyboard…no alt-click-shifting required :)
  • Eraser: E
  • Brush: B
  • Increase brush/eraser size: ]
  • Decrease brush/eraser size: [

• I know its hard to read the settings in the above image, so select a basic hard round brush.  Then, in the brush presets box, you need to set the brush to “Wet Edges“.   Now is a great time to just play around, try out all the other settings in the brush presets box, maybe even try different brushes!  I also liked the results I got using “Round Point Stiff” and “Watercolor Loaded Wet Flat Tip” (both CS5 brush presets).
• With the pen tablet, the software will create different effects based on how hard you press, too!  So play with this to know how to consistently get the look you want.

Getting Started

• Zoom in so that the image you want to paint is nice and big to make it easy to work with.
• For your reference through the remaining examples, I created a sample stroke and splat with my brush at two different opacities.  The stroke and splat on the left is in my brightest pink color at 50% opacity; the pair on the right were created at 25% opacity.  Notice the difference in the size of the “splat” dots?  I used the same brush size, but with different amounts of pressure on my pen tablet when I created them, thus creating the dots at two different sizes.
• We’re going to color in the cute little princess with the tea cup, and we’ll use a 3-step process.

Start Painting!

I paint in multiple layers because its the easiest way to “undo” something I don’t like.  You can also hide and un-hide combinations of layers to get different results!  And lastly, remember that you can erase…you can create a brush for erasing similar to what you use for painting, with reduced opacity, and effectively remove color where you need to.  So let’s get started!

• BASE LAYER:  Create a new layer, and title it “princess base paint”
• Set your brush to 50% opacity.  I used a 50 pixel brush, (roughly the size of the big splat in the image above).
• Paint a base coat of color around the inside of the section you wish to paint.  Don’t be perfect! Here’s what mine looked like after this step:

• COLOR VARIATION LAYER:  Create another new layer and name it Bob.  Just kidding…name it what you like :)
• Set your brush to 25% opacity, but keep the brush at roughly the same size.
• Paint in more color!  This is where your practice with brush strokes comes in handy, as the whole point here is to create color variation in the space.  I used a combination of strokes and “splats” to create the example below.

• EDGING LAYER:  Create a final color layer and again, name it what you like :)
• Set your brush to 13% opacity and cut the brush size roughly in half (25px for me).
• Here is where you can just add in more color and finer detail where you want it.  I like to have the edges of my image darker than the center, so I add a lot more around the edges.  You’ll notice that if you paint on white that 13% opacity is barely any color – but when it is layered on top of existing color, it adds a nice subtle touch!

Make it your own

There are a million ways to take this basic technique and make it your own!  If you like less color in your watercolor pieces, just reduce the opacity of the brush in each of the steps above.  And be sure to try out all the various brushes and settings available – they do some really cool stuff.  The new preset brushes in CS5 let you control settings specific to the bristles, which produces some really cool results.  I highly recommend opening up a blank document and just coloring a bit.  The upside?  It’s nice and relaxing, too!  :)

So here’s the final invitation!  I hope this little tutorial today has inspired you to add a little paint to YOUR next project!

 Thanks for stopping by, you won’t want to miss tomorrow when we share our latest TEMPLATE CHALLENGE (five) :o)

BeckieTips and Tricks, Uncategorized 17 Comments