Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods

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Real Watercolor - Dry watercolor methods 

 

Now that Painter 12 has been released for a few weeks, I think it's a good time to start blogging about some of the new and exciting features available for Painter's brushes.

First a quick introduction.  My name is Chris, and I am a software developer for Painter.  I love Painter's brushes, and enjoy working on them even more.  Over the next weeks, I will be writing about some of the new stuff available, but I will also include some tips and techniques for some of our older brush technologies.

 

There is a lot that is new in Painter 12: Real Watercolor, Real Wet Oil, Multicore support, Stroke Attributes and much more.  I am obviously really excited about the new possibilities with the Real Watercolor engine, the realistic movement of water, the pigment mixing and so on.  I could write several pages just on this topic.  But I will try to spread my excitement over several weeks emoticon

 

So for now, what I would like to write about are "Dry Watercolor" brushes.  These are what I call brushes that use the "Dry Methods" which are available with the new the Real Watercolor engine.

 

By default Painter 12 has 2 variants in the Real Watercolor category that uses a "dry method".  

 

They are:

-Fractal Dry

-Splatter Dry

 

Here are sample strokes created with these brushes:

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods.jpg

 

If you open the General Brush Control panel, you will notice that both of these brushes use the Real Dry Buildup submethod.  There is another dry submethod available called Real Dry Cover.  I will get back to the difference shortly.

 

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For now, I would like to mention that these "dry methods" are called dry because they only deposit pigment on your surface. There is no water being deposited, meaning that there is no water flow that will push your pigment around. By comparison, Real Wet Buildup, Real Wet Cover and Real Wet Replace will deposit both pigment and water.  I don't know if there is a real world equivalent to "waterless watercolour" brushes, but we are in the digital world! 

 

Since there is no water flow, brushes that use the dry methods will be quite a bit faster, and are usually good candidates for laying down your groundwork, or filling large areas of color.  Of course they can be used for detailed work as well.  In this image, I converted the Real Variable Tip Pen from the Pens category to a dry watercolor brush to create the detailed stroke.  More on converting existing brushes to dry watercolor a bit later...

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods3.jpg

 

Also, since there is no water flow, most of the controls in the Real Watercolor panel do not change the behaviour of dry watercolour brushes.  There is only one control that makes a difference on this panel, this is Concentration which will adjust the pigment concentration.  The effect will be similar to opacity, however it is applied directly to the concentration of the pigment, so you can adjust opacity on top of your pigment concentration. 

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods4.png

 

You can easily convert a wet brush into a dry brush just by selecting one of the dry submethods.  Similarily, you can convert almost any brush in Painter into a dry watercolour brush by selecting the wet method, and a dry submethod. Once you select a Real Dry submethod, your brush will be depositing pigment on a watercolor layer when you paint with it.  

 

You can combine dry pigment over existing watercolour strokes that were created with wet brushes.  You can even combine the dry pigment with brushes from the old watercolour category (see the Watercolor category), as long as you paint on a watercolour layer.

 

In the image below, I used a chalk brush (Variable Chalk) that I converted to use the Wet method, and the Real Dry Cover submethod .  The only other change made to the brush is that I increased grain to 100%.  Because not all brushes interpret grain the same way, the chalk had grain set to 10% which was not enough for the dry watercolor version.  Now that the brush deposits pigment on a watercolor layer, I can use any watercolor brush to interact with the pigment such as the Bleach Splatter variant from the OLD watercolor category.

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods5.jpg

 

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As I mentioned above, there are 2 new dry submethods.  Real Dry Buildup and Real Dry Cover.  Essentially, the difference is that the Buildup version allows pigment to "buildup" and get darker, whereas "cover" limits the pigment buildup.  Using the "cover" submethod, the pigment will only buildup up to the currently selected color.  So depending on the pigment darkness you want you would choose buildup or cover.  In the image below I used the same color to create both splatter patterns, but the bottom one used Real Dry Cover instead of Real Dry Buildup. 

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods7.jpg

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods8.png

 

Although not new to Painter 12, the Wet Remove Density submethod can be considered a "dry submethod", because it works without depositing water.  This method is used to remove or erase pigment.  This is useful to lighten areas of your watercolour painting.

 

You can try these 2 new brushes in the Real Watercolor category which use this submethod:

-Fractal Dry Erase

-Scratch

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods9.jpg

 

I like to convert the "Splatter Dry" brush by selecting the Wet Remove Density to get interesting texture in my pigment. 

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods10.png

 

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This image shows a combination of dry watercolor effects.  DISCLAIMER: I am not an artist emoticon

 

Real Watercolor - Dry Watercolor Methods12.jpg

Well that about sums it up for creating and modifying "dry watercolour" brushes, which is part of the new Real Watercolor engine.   Of course, most of the coolness of this engine comes from actually using wet brushes and realistic water flow, instead of painting with dry pigment.  This will be topics for future blog posts emoticon

 

If you have any questions or comments please send them along, in the meantime happy painting!
 

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