Lecture 6: Watercolors, & Pen & Ink

Warmups!

Handy Trick

Painter often fails to switch the the hand cursor when you hold the spacebar key. Try holding the spacebar, moving the cursor without clicking, then click-drag the workspace around.

Another Handy Trick

To get the best results when setting tracking, start with light pressure then end with heavy pressure. You're screen might look something like this:

Tracking

This will give you a good range of sensitivity with pressure.

Set tracking
Three One Minutes
Use New File, 1200px x 1200px, 150ppi, white paper (portrait or landscape, your choice)
One Five Minute

WebAccess Section: Brush Samples

I've added a page to our web site that consolidates all the brush samples I've done in one place. Included are:

Painter's Digital Watercolor, Watercolor, and Real Watercolor Brushes

I have no idea why there are three types. Digital Watercolor and Watercolor have been around for a while in Painter, Real Watercolor is new as of Painter 12.

Digital works on any layer or the Canvas, Watercolor and Real Watercolor work on special Watercolor Layers

Skip Allen has an excellent set of videos (7) on working with the three types of watercolor to achieve a very watercolor-like image

Digital Watercolor

Source .rif

Source image

Techniques

Unlike Watercolor brushes, it works on any normal layer
White = clear water
Works in regular layers
Painter Gotcha!: Sets non-canvas layers to Gel composition unless a non-Digital Watercolor brush has already been used on that layer, in which case, Digital Watercolor will fail
Useful Feature: Set up commonly used brushes in a separate palette of custom brushes like Fine Tip Water, Fine Mop Brush, Tapered diffused Water (remember to hold down the shift-key when dragging off the brushes) (looks better in Painter 2017)
Use one end of the tablet pen for Fine Tip Water and the other for Finer Mop Brush
Source photo
Pencil sketch from Cloned photo, clone turned off.
Flower painted in on one layer
Flower glazed for shadow area at bottom
Background painted in and edges cleaned up around flower
Cool trick: Copy the background layer to make it more intense and darker

Variations

Add some salt
Add some Paper Texture

Drop all for paper texture, or Painter will drop it for you. If it was a watercolor layer, Painter (without updating the Layers Panel's name) will turn the current watercolor layer into a non-watercolor layer.

Pen & Ink

Use the Fine Point variant of Pens
Choose 100% black
Use Smooth Ink pen for thick/thin lines
Use Nervous Pen for a sense of spontaneous energy
Pen Variants

A Pen & Ink Drawing

2014things.zip Croquil Pen 5

things_cube.ai

A cube drawn out for correct 3-point perspective in Illustrator

things_scan.png

A scanned sketch from the Illustrator printout with things roughed in

things_001.rif

Ink outlines of things, box, and horizon
Note that the outlines are on their own layer

things_002.rif

Adds a folder with layers of filling in the things with white shapes made with the pen tool

things_004.rif

Shades things on several layers

things_005.rif

Shades things on several layers

things_background.psd

A composite collage of cumulus clouds and an ocean surface, turned to greyscale and sized for the things drawing (1856 x 3)

cumulusclouds.jpg

Source image used to trace cloud background from

Auto Painting with Custom Strokes

Final Auto-Painting

Source: auto_painting-scripps_sunset.zip

Painter Wow Book, chapter 7, pp 270-272

Create an Underpainting

Open example photo:
Open Auto Painting Panels
Set like this:
Save the Color Scheme with the plus sign next to the Photo Enhance popup menu
Save the under-painted image as "scripps_sunset_underpainting"

Record a Custom Stroke

Make a new scratch document to throw away later
Set brush to Pastel > Variable Oil Pastel, default size (16.4px) Size
Practice a few times to get something like this:
In the Auto Painting panel (part of the Underpainting/Resoration/Auto-Painting panel set) click on the "Record Stroke" menu from popup menu under the little triangle next to the Stroke popup menu
Paint the stroke. You can try more than once until you get one you like, Painter will only record the last stroke you made (from stylus down to stylus up)
When you've got one you like, choose Save Stroke from the same popup menu
Save it as "My Stroke"

Make a Clone

To start the auto-painting, we'll create a clone to work from.

With the Scripps Sunset Underpainting window in front, choose Menu > Quick Clone, or choose the Auto-Clone button in the lower right of the Underpainting panel:

Start Auto-Painting

Turn off the Tracing with Control/Command-T
Switch to the Auto-Painting panel:
Choose a brush: Let's use the same Variable Oil Pastel
- Variable Oil Pastel might include Color Variability. Open Menu > Window > Brush Control Panel --> General
- Double-click on Color Variability if it's not fully visible
- Set the HSV sliders each to a low value, ~ 25 or less
IMPORTANT STEP: Set the brush's color to Clone Color:
Set the Auto-Paint panel with custom brush stroke thusly:
Stroke: My Stroke, Randomness: 95%, Pressure: 90%, Length: 50%, Rotation: 180°, Brush Size: 75%
Make sure the brush is still set to Variable Oil Pastel!