From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

840 Painting a watercolor wash background

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

Start my 1-month free trial

840 Painting a watercolor wash background

“

- [Instructor] All right, now we'll take a look at how you might go about creating this blue watercolor wash in the background. Now currently we're seeing the artwork inside Photoshop, but I actually created it inside of a mobile app called Adobe Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad Pro, but it's also compatible with Android devices. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch to my artwork so far, once again, open inside Adobe Sketch, and I want the background to appear behind the other layers, so I'll tap the background layer over here on the left side of the screen. Again, I've swapped things because I'm left-handed. By default, the layers appear on the right-hand side of the screen. And now I'll create a new layer by tapping on the little plus sign above the layers, and I'll create a new sketch layer, and then I'll select this second to bottom most brush right here, which, by default, if I tap on it, you can see, if I then tap on the Settings icon there, that this is a Watercolor Flat Brush, which happens to work perfectly for creating watercolor washes. All right, so I'll go ahead and hide that stuff. Now notice I've set my color to a shade of blue right here, which matches the Miro painting known as "Figure, Star." And I've also made my brush very large. Notice that it's larger, just slightly larger, in this case, than 300 pixels. All right, now I'm going to tap the full screen icon in the top right corner of the screen, and then I'm just going to paint away. Now, one of the things I love about this brush is that if you stop painting, the paint remains wet. As long as you don't switch to a different layer or switch to a different brush, that paint is still wet, so imagine you're painting watercolor onto a wet canvas and see how the colors start to bleed. So the brushstroke goes from having a very sharp edge, as we're seeing here, to a soft edge as it bleeds into the other artwork. And that's because, again, this layer is treated as if it's wet paper. All right, now I'm going to zoom in just by pinching outward, and that way I avoid painting over that full screen icon, and now I'll just go ahead and fill in that corner like so, and now I'll go ahead and zoom back out, and I'll paint all over the place, as you see me doing here. It looks pretty bad as you're painting, but then, again, as soon as you release, the colors are all going to start bleeding into each other very much as if you had created this effect as a single brush stroke. So again, this is the default behavior, so long as you don't switch layers or switch tools. All right, so, I'm going to go ahead and paint in some more stuff right here, and then, after you get things roughed in, you might want to go ahead and add some more details. For example, I'm going to paint some more inside of the body, and I'm going to paint up here at the top of the head, down here below the feet, and so forth, just in order to fill in some of these regions. Now I don't want to go too far with it, because I want this textural variation, and this is all created by painting the same color over and over again at different levels of translucency on this specific layer. All right, now I'm going to pinch out in order to expand this guy to fill in the entire screen. Not quite working out the way I want it to, so I'm going to tap the full screen icon in the top right corner, and I'm going to tap Close in the top left corner of the screen, because I want you to see something. When you close the artwork, that's when Sketch goes ahead and saves your changes. So it's a good idea to close your artwork every once in a while, just to make sure you don't lose any of your work. All right, now I'm going to tap on that top left document to once again open it up inside Sketch. And what I want to do at this point is paint some white into the body, and let me remind you of what I'm talking about. I'll go ahead and close this guy, and I'll open up my version of "Figure, Star" right here and go ahead and switch to the full screen mode. See how the body, and the neck, and the head, and that white thing are all surrounded by white borders? Now you could achieve this effect by erasing if you wanted to, and so I'll go ahead and bring back the interface and tap the word Close, and then I'll bring up my artwork. And so I could switch to the Eraser, which is this checkerboard thing down here at the bottom, and then I could just go ahead and erase inside the artwork, but if I did that, even if I did so more carefully than I have so far, then I would be applying a permanent modification. I do not want to do that, so I'm going to undo that change, and instead I'm going to create a new layer by tapping the plus sign up here above the layers, and selecting Sketch Layer once again, and then I'll select that Ink Pen, the second to top item, tap on it again, and change the color this time to white, so I'll go ahead and drag this guy to the center and make sure that the slider down here at the bottom is cranked all the way over to the right, and I might go ahead and increase the size item right there, so that I'm painting a little more quickly. And now I'll go ahead and paint around the body. Now you don't want to make this thing perfectly manicured. We're looking for expressive results at this point, and also, of course, this item is an abstraction, it is not a piece of representational art, and that's very important to keep in mind. Right, then I can just go ahead and paint inside the body if I want, and I'm going to come back to that in just a moment, though, and I'm going to switch to the full screen mode by tapping that top right icon again, and then I'll paint up the neck and around this head, let's say, and I'm not trying to make it uniform. In fact, I'm trying very hard not to make these lines uniform. And then I'll paint around this guy right here, like so. And you can see that I added a little white dot over there on the left-hand side of the artwork. You have to keep an eye out for that. That's because I put my knuckle down at that location, and so just be watchful because it's really easy to do. I'll bring back the interface and I'll click on that brush icon to bring back all the default brushes, and then I'll select the eraser down here at the bottom, and I'll just go ahead and erase that guy over there on the left-hand side of the screen. And you can have fun with the eraser, by the way. If I were to tap on this guy in order to bring up the size, for example, and reduce the size to make it very small, such as, let's say, about eight pixels, then you can do this number where you kind of introduce some scratchy edges into the white boundary. Totally up to you, if you want to go that route. That's not really something you're going to see in the original Miro artwork, however, obviously, we want to sometimes go our own way. And so I'm just going to paint in some more scratchy details over around these sides right here, and then possibly even around this guy, just a little bit, I think, in order to rough things up. All right, now I'm going to turn off a couple of layers so I could better see what I'm doing, and you can turn off a layer by double tapping on it. So if I double tap on this guy right there, notice it now has an eyeball with a slash through it, and I'm going to turn off the layer above it, and the one with the two squares as well, so that we can better see that white layer. You might want to tap on it again just to make sure it's active. Now I don't really want that panel to be up on screen, so I'll tap the thumbnail once again to hide it, and then I'll tap on the brush over here on the right-hand side of the screen and switch to my Ink Pen, which should be nice and big still, and now I'll just go ahead and paint in. Now I don't necessarily want to fill this in all together. I want it to have, once again, that expressive feel to it, and I want it to have a little bit of childish quality as well. So part of the charm of some of Miro's artwork is that it does have that primitive quality to it, and so something like this looks pretty darn good, and then I'll go ahead and paint up the neck and into the head, and then into the center of the sun, or this orb, or whatever it might. Now I'll just go ahead and double tap those hidden layers in order to bring it back, like so, and that way we can see our full composition. At which point I'll go ahead and tap that full screen icon once again to hide the interface. And that, friends, is at least one way to create a watercolor wash background using, in my case, Adobe Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad Pro.

Contents