Okay, I admit it I've been holding back. But here it is now, how I create the ultimate realistic water color look.
For some time now I've been experimenting with a lot of techniques to get realistic watercolor looks to my painting. The Dry Brush effect is too uniform and mottled, and the Liquid and even the new P7 watercolor brushes don't always give me the grainy diffused paint look that I want, and are a bit of a challenge to work with. If you've gone to my tutorial page I've perfected the technique using an overlay of scanned watercolor brush strokes. But now I've perfected it even further.
The Starting images
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My first step is to take the photograph (Left) and transform it into an abstraction (right) using some of the effects techniques in Microsoft's PhotoDraw II (my CD tutorial goes into depth on this, but alas, this software program has been discontinued by Microsoft). This becomes my base image.
Step 2 - The overlay
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The next step is combining some scanned watercolor brush strokes that I did with the base image. For the watercolor brush strokes, I simply take an 8.5 x 11 sheet of H20 paper and make some interesting brush strokes and then scan them in at 300 dpi in B&W. By using the overlay method the tones and textures of the watercolor paper diffuse into the color of the image. You will need to play with the darkness and contrast as well as the opacity of the layer. You could stop here, but the next step really perfects it.