snap art tutorial #2, subtle watercolor effects
Theory: The watercolor masters (especially the Chinese ones) all had something in common. They were able to merge the seemingly incongruous elements of the medium, transposing the tonality and formlessness of the diluted paint, while retaining exquisite detail in their subjects.
Objective: Creating the perfect montage between a sharp landscape photo and a watercolor painting, tricking the eye into believing the work is created via some fine art printing process. (Curly voice): Knyuck, knyuck, knyuck.
Begin: First, lets take a seemingly banal photo and give it some real punch.
Fig 1: Here is a landscape that will serve as
our subject. I am a big landscape fan, so I decided
that perhaps a simple sunset scene on the water
would be a nice way to really show the power of
Snap Art. I chose a scene from Juneau Alaska, where
I was lucky enough to go to this summer. As can be
seen, this photo lends itself nicely to the
watercolor filter... it has areas of clouds and
less detail, and areas of mountains and islands
that have more.
Fig. 2: Using the "Abstract, Pastel Colors
Brush" in the Watercolor tab, under the settings
menu, I adjusted the "Basic" tab to fit the
settings I desired for my piece. Since I wanted the
whole piece covered, I thought it might be nice to
experiment, and bump the brush size all the way to
100, and boost the paint coverage all the way to
99. Since my photo already has good detail, I
decided to leave the fine edge detail at 0 this
time so as not to introduce artifacts that affect
sharpness, but again, YMMV with how you approach
your pieces.... the same goes to be said for wet
brush (default) over dry brush. In this instance,
the other tabs are all completely untouched.
Finally, remember to click the "Create Output in
New Layer" so that you can fine tune your piece and
retail full control over its opacity.
Fig. 3: Here is the piece as it comes to us
from art using the above settings. Again, you can
play with how much coverage you like, but since I
wanted coverage for my whole piece, I went with 99.
This layer sits on top of the "Background" photo
for now, as I go in to create a canvas effect.
Fig. 4: Usually, fine art watercolor pieces
benefit from a texture layer that simulates the
depth of traditional artistic media, particularly
canvas or rice paper like textures. Here is a
pattern I use frequently from the How to Wow
photoshop book, but almost any "canvas like"
texture will do. Using a pattern fill layer, I set
the scale size to %323 (because of the size of this
particular 6676*2425px piece) and added it on top
of the watercolor layer and the photo layer. Now,
its time to play with opacity and the lighting
settings.
Fig. 5: At this point, your layer stack should
look like this. For the the watercolor canvas
pattern, I set the opacity to 53% and the lighting
to darken, just enough to give it visible
texture.
Fig. 6: For the Snap Art Watercolor layer, the
opacity is set to 85% and the lighting to "Soft
Light". This adds the subtlety we need to create
the all the detail of the original photo, but
realistically imitate that hand embellished piece.
Now, with our layer
adjustments, we have a fine art piece with the
divine abnormalities of both a hand embellished
chemical process, and a masterful landscape
watercolor. Viola! Mission accomplished.
Fig. 7: Before
Fig. 8: After
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