digital watercolor help?

**zoephoenix** · April 18th, 2007, 07:46 PM

I'm experimenting with the digital watercolor tool of painter 9 (specifically the "new simple water" brush) and I like it, but... I can't get anything to affect it after I put it on the canvas... not any blending tools or erasers or anything. http://www.zemotion.net/noah gets some really nice effects with Painter's watercolor tool, but I have no idea how he blends colors together like that using painter... I can kind of do it in photoshop, but painter is still kind of foreign to me... I'm having a hard time with it. Help?

**lordofthebling** · April 18th, 2007, 11:05 PM

Watercolour (and Digital Watercolour) are separate brush sets that are handled differently from other brushes. Basically, they're given their own layers. You can't actually see or edit the Digital Watercolour layer, but it can be thought of as a layer nonetheless.

To help put it into perspective, try painting on a Multiply layer using any other media. You can do whatever you want with it, but because it's on a layer, it doesn't affect the underlying marks. And because it's in Multiply mode, it remains transparent. The Watercolour brush category uses this same principle, except the blend mode is Gel, and the brushes exhibit the same bleeding/dispursion properties as natural watercolour. Digital Watercolour simplifies this process.

With Digital Watercolour, the paint remains "wet" for as long as you want. However, during this time, the watercolour is incompatible with other tools, since it is essentially on a separate layer that the other tools cannot access. So you need to dry the Digital Watercolour. To do this, click Layer>Dry Digital Watercolour. This is similar to dropping a Multiply layer. Once you've done this, you can no longer do any wet-into-wet blending with more watercolour, but you can use other tools such as the eraser, glow brush, blenders, etc. However, the Digital Watercolour brush category contains variants that allow you to blend, erase, and disrupt your still wet watercolour. Additionally, you can use any Digital Watercolour brush as an eraser by setting the colour to white.

**Jin** · April 19th, 2007, 02:50 PM

As lordofthebling says:

Digital Watercolor is painted on a layer and I'll add that this layer is often referred to as the "invisible Wet Layer". It doesn't appear in the Layers palette list like other Layers do.

Wet Digital Watercolor paint on the Canvas can be blended using the following Digital Watercolor variants (others, too, after making adjustments in the Brush Controls' Well palette):

Flat Water Blender (works best for me with Opacity reduced to about 2%, but it still doesn't work as well for me as the New Simple Blender)
New Simple Blender (works best for me with Opacity reduced to 17% or lower to avoid making a black stroke)
Pure Water Bristle (works best for me with Opacity reduced to about 3%)
Round Water Blender (works best for me with Opacity reduced to about 3%)
Soft Round Blender (works best for me with Opacity reduced to about 3%)

After testing all of the above brush variants, I reset my Brush Tracking (Preferences > Brush Tracking) using different levels of hand pressure in my test brush stroke painted on the scratch pad and found that helped a lot as I didn't need to reduce Opacity so much. You'll need to experiment, though, to find what works best for you.

To make some of the other Digital Watercolor variants work to blend wet Digital Water Color paint, go to the Brush Controls' Well palette and move the Resaturation slider to 0% and the Bleed slider to 100%, test, then adjust the Bleed slider as needed.

You may need to make other adjustments when working with wet Digital Watercolor paint on a Layer (automatically set to Composite Method Gel to provide the intended look of transparent watercolor), as Digital Watercolor variants often behave differently on Layers than on the Canvas.

Wet Digital Watercolor paint can be erased using the following Digital Watercolor variants: