Playing with Paint

Today, I played with paint for entirely legitimate reasons! I had one goal: create a bunch of expressive watercolors with texture. They only needed to have a range of hue, good contrast, lots of blooming and good texture. That basically meant getting a big area sopping wet with clean water, then going at it with a brush sopping wet with paint.

This is not how I usually work. In fact, it’s the opposite of how I usually work. But this week, I found myself needing some real-life watercolors to build myself some Photoshop brushes. After a week of digital editing, it was nice to have an excuse to just go nuts, and have unstructured fun.

Now that they’re scanned, I’m going to bring them into Photoshop and edit them to turn them into digital brushes. This will involve desaturating them completely to make them grayscale and then re-balancing the brightness and contrast. After I assign them as brushes in Photoshop, I’ll be able to “stamp” them into an image and adjust the color as I like. My plan for these is to experiment with placing them behind the floral illustrations from my last post.

Other than playing with paint, this week I spent a lot of time in Photoshop digitally editing and remixing those floral gouache illustrations. I’m combining each design into a dense, maximalist repeating pattern like a busy calico fabric. It’s going really well so far, and two of the four patterns are completed. The next post will feature some of those prints, and hopefully include how my watercolor brushes look in action!