Painter 7 Tutorial

I use Painter 7 and an Intuos 3 tablet.
I took Ellisha’s photo into PhotoShop first to resize to about 12 inches wide. The levels were ok, and I sharpened it with USM a little, then brought it into Painter, cloned, and made tracing paper.

The light on her face is coming from her left, so that’s where I wanted the least detail. In real watercolors, I would begin with the line drawing, but I work backwards in Painter and do the colorwash first; that may just be me.

This screen capture shows the brush settings, and I zoomed in to show the color variations that the watercolor fine cloner leaves in her hair. I stroke the brush along the lines of her hair and lightly block in the contours of her face and body. Then I turn off the original layer below to work on details.

The colors I saw in this photo were gold, charcoal, and a peachy pink. I took the eyedropper and selected the charcoal and tweaked it to a soft baby blue for a fourth color. I made a new watercolor layer, chose the flat wash watercolor brush, and began lightly laying down a blue and peach background, also brushing some blue into her jacket. I didn’t much like my results, but I didn’t delete it, just turned it off and made another watercolor layer and tried again. I ended up using them both at 50% opacity.

Next I made another layer for the outline and chose the 2B pencil. I didn’t want my drawing to be overpowering or painfully accurate. I used my artistic license to exaggerate her eyelashes, something I do when painting children, pretty women or gorgeous guys. I indicated strands of hair, outlined portions of her sweater, mouth and hands, but not every square inch of them.
Finally, I gave it a sandstone texture in PhotoShop. Let me know if anything here isn’t clear.
cat bounds