Make your own Watercolour photos

Watercolour is one of the most popular forms of painting, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a very forgiving medium that allows mistakes to be easily corrected. It can also be used to great effect without you having to be particularly precise in your strokes. For these reasons, this somewhat impressionistic medium is ideal for a first foray into digital painting.

By Freddy Camargo / Tuesday, December 01 2009

Watercolour techniques are ideal for blending and melding images. In the following workshop, we’ll be combining the fluid lines and soft strokes of a watercolour brush with the precision and detail of a digital photo.

It’s perfectly possible to use the effects tools found in a photo editor to emulate a painting – many can roughly reproduce a Van Gogh or a Lichtenstein from a digital image. But we want to combine a photo with our own brushstrokes and produce a sophisticated composite image.

We’ve scanned in some treated art papers and taken a portrait photo. However, you could just as easily do it all digitally. Similarly, we’ve used a combination of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Illustrator, but it’s possible to apply brush effects from within your photo editor. Even free apps such as The Gimp (gimp.org) and Microsoft Paint have basic brush-overlay tools, while CorelDraw or Painter (corel.com) are ideal low-cost alternatives to Adobe Illustrator. To create the basic image you’ll need some cold press art paper, some watercolour paints and a scanner. If you don’t have a scanner, you can use a digital camera to shoot the texture effect you want to apply to the original photo. For most of this tutorial we’ve used Adobe Photoshop Elements, but the effects can just as easily be applied using CorelDraw, Painter or Adobe Illustrator. We’ll use the latter application later in this tutorial.